Reflection Of Work....

At the Beginning of this year I found that I had quite a lot of issues with my standard of my work , My figure and location drawing wasn’t to a great standard , I still found it daunting to use basic photoshop and  that I didn’t  experiment with media as much as I would have liked to

When drawing the human form, I tended to exaggerate the figure, elongating the legs and giving them quite delicate features, this style wasn’t working for me and I decided to correct this by doing more and more Life and Figure drawing.  I was able to develop my style and I saw a drastic change from last years work to this years . My sequential project this year was not a success for due to  my lack of figure drawing , 

I have learned from this and began to really research into the figure and pose I wanted  before drawing it in my style . For my children’s book I decided to challenge areas that I found difficult and this was the figure proportions and drawing children , I have always found proportions difficult and for this project I think it was wise to choose to draw something that would challenge and stimulate my own personal practice . Overall my figure drawing has gotten much better and this is mostly due to the research, figure  and location drawings I would do Authorship projects and other modules.

I tended to use the same media over and over again and this year decided to try some new types of media as well as develop the ones I already knew worked well for my images. Copics and water colour  have always worked well for me and I continued to use these this year , I saw myself getting more confident with them and with the colour experiments I found myself moving away from the greyscale color scheme to more colourful and tonally varied pieces of work. I also ventured back to using ink  briefly as  was this  a media which I enjoyed working with in the past and thought I could develop more in . 

I think one of my best developments in my personal practice was that I experimented  with Photoshop a lot more. This is a program which I have struggled with for a while now and was always hesitant to use, however , during my Narrative project I found myself experimenting with the program and by the time the Children’s Book module had finished I had taught myself basic editing, digital painting and many other skills which were very helpful for the module. 

I now find myself using photoshop quite a bit for my work , with me drawing and colouring the majority of my work traditionally and then editing and adding background on photoshop, I still to work on creating backgrounds as I often make they too overbearing and distracts the viewer from the main image, but this is something for me to work on .

Overall I think I have tried to be more adventurous and looked at  many of the  areas  which I find challenging , I have worked on them and will continue to develop my personal practice. I feel more confident with my own style now and not so hesitant when it comes to drawing figures, colouring or using new media , I found that I enjoyed creating and developing characters and narrative for my projects and this is something which I would like to explore more in the future  as I enjoy looking at the development of characterisation ,  how to incorporate this into a narrative  and the process of designing the characters and environment .

Promo Pieces

Here are examples of the development of my promo piece in the form of  cards,

This is my original design and then photoshopped design

I then designed examples of my work to be put onto the cards which I then printed .

Publication Module

These are some of my most recent work for my "Illustration for Publication " module ,

While deciding which job to illustrate for the zine project we were given , I decided to take this opportunity to draw some other figures . 

while home for a weekend I was able to do some observational drawing of my dad as he worked around the stables and poly-tunnels near our family home .

By this time I had already began work on my Publication module work and started to look at figure drawings for this , The theme for this project was "wilderness" and I decided to base my project on how early raiders such as vikings and saxons would perceive places like Early Britain , which would be an alienated and wild landscape which would only be enhanced by the presence of early celt peoples or feral people .

this is some of the figure drawing and research I have been doing  :

People at Work

For part of the  "Illustration for Publication " module, we were given a 3 week project where each student in the course would produce an illustration for a zine entitled "People At Work".

This is some of the work I produced for this project , my research drawings and figure drawings of a friend who works part time as a reenactor . I have always found his job interesting and I admire his enthusiasm for his work , it is more of a hobby for him but his interest in history and passion to teach others makes him an ideal figure for this project . 

This is some of my figure drawings for this project:

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I found a lot of my work for the zine to be quite static so I decided to watch some videos of people doing sword fighting and sword demonstrations to get a rough idea of movement, stances , how does one hold a sword and different types of swords .

There is a particular section where my friend addresses the crowd and explains different types of swords and stances .

 The weapon I most remember form his demonstrations are the Zweihänder swords, a large two handed sword which he uses to demonstrate both one and two handed sword fighting methods .

This was the final image that I submitted for the zine , this is the coloured version:

And this is the greyscale image that was put into the zine :

My Development over this year..... - my relationship with photoshop

I began to experiment with Photoshop much more after the Christmas break , as a complete novice with this program I started small, only experimenting with editing and colouring my images

I then began to experiment with digital painting, I still find it much quicker to  draw and colour the image myself but It gives a different look to my images that I find interesting and will probably look at more in future 

For my Illustration for Children's Books Module, I was able to experiment with photoshop quite a bit , using it to edit my final images, add text and texture and to create layouts and borders for my work .

For example, this image I was able to add text too and duplicate the texture I had on the original image to put under the text, I also added the boarder which I had drawn out and then edited on photoshop . I also edited the original image on photoshop as I had made a mistake with the colouring on the original, making the background Blue too stark so that it engulfed some of the more important details such as the dwarf in blue.

My most recent work with photoshop has been for editing my work I did on pirates and creating a design for my own promo work .

My work for a possible promo piece featuring  revamped versions
of two of my own characters.

I created the background on photoshop for this image of "Sockhead Syd "
from " The Bootstrappers Pirate Band"

My development over this year....- Working with colour

At the beginning of the year , my work was still focusing on very little colour, me favouring black and white or greyscale images which was fine for the work I was doing at the time, before this year I didn't really see the point to much colour in my work as I didn't feel confident using it  and I preferred to stay with greyscale images.

But as the year progressed and I began to experiment more with colour and tone , I began to see my work morphing.

I began to use more colour in my work , this began with my Narrative illustration module , where I discovered metallic Copic markers, My own visual style changed slightly for this project and it seemed that my use of colour was effected by this , It was a small change but my illustrations began to have a bit more vivid colour but I didn't seem to venture far from my greys and blacks.

It was when I started the Illustration for Children's Books module that I really saw my outlook on colour change ,

by experimenting with colour palettes and figuring out which colours married well together and which didn't I was able to begin to see which colours I tended to use more predominantly and then find my own specific colour scheme which I enjoyed working with. I began to use quite a bit of decorative texture and pattern in my work too by this stage which really enhanced my work .

The best example of these two elements together was for the double page spreads for my children's book , where I married my new found knowledge of colour schemes and patterns to develop colour illustrations that I was very happy with , particularly with the image below where I worked very hard to develop a specific colour scheme  for the characters of the Dwarves , I gave each dwarf a unique pattern and clothing but also defined which were related by the use of  similar colour and a varying degrees of decoration around the patterns.

My Development over this year .... - Life drawing and research Drawing

Looking at my work from this year, I can say that my work has developed drastically from the standard of  my work from last year .

The Life drawings and location studies show real progress from last years work , better figure drawings and a sense of proportion . I found that I gradually got better at drawing a figure and then using it as a basis for my own work as my work tends to focus on people quite a lot .

Location drawing was also vital for me this year and it helped me understand prospective a little better and allowed me to experiment with how to frame an image via perspective .