Monday, December 7, 2009

[Witty title]

Where to begin? I've always found the start to be a good place.

The poster project went well. I was very happy with what I produced. For my first time making a poster, I enjoyed it and found it challenging. Here be the poster:



I tried to emulate the style of Derek Hess as well as using my own style. I think I mixed the two well, but seeing as my style is pretty similar already, it wasn't as big an effort.

After this we did another poster project. This time we had to copy a poster that we found. I looked through a big book of posters (I thought it would be a good book to look through for a poster) and found a nice gig poster by a man called Jay Ryan.
It was a fun experiment and I found that although his style is a little different, it is still quite loose at times and is something I can learn from when it comes to incorporating other artists' work into my ideas and the little image library in my head.

Here's the original:



And then my copy:



I started by putting a high res. scan of the poster into photoshop, where I then put a new layer over the top and traced round the figure. For the letters I used the magic wand tool to select the shapes. I found a font that was very similar to this but it cost a pretty penny to get. I'm a student. And I'm on an exchange programme. I don't have the luxury of what most people know as an 'income'.
The muscle memory, if you will, that came from copying this figure (thrice, it turned out, thanks to the computer hating me and not saving the image) meant that I could easily draw this over and over without using the reference material. This is how we learn.

The last project the we did (and the one that I am handing in minutes from now) was to make a big character, taken from a selection of typefaces, out of mount board. It was a brilliant project! Although my final piece warped somewhat, I was pretty happy with it. As with all the projects on the course, it was my first time attempting something like this and it is something that is going to prove very useful in the future.
Voila:



In a few parts the sides are coming off the main face of the character. I would put this down to warping of the material. It went swimmingly when I dry-fit the material but after the gluing the things together and leaving it for a few nights, it had pulled apart somewhat. The paint that I used was good but I think I could have used another coat or two. Or at least a solid, non-patchy coat.

All in all it's been a fantastic year for learning things that I wanted to learn prior to getting here but never having the time or motivation to sit down and teach myself.

To finish in my usual style, here is a project that I finished the other week for my Drawing class:



And then two doodles; both emulating - and inspired by - the style of an artist under the username 'tooms' on an art forum I post on.



This style is appealing because it calls for bold lines. You have to know where you want them to go and not worry about getting it wrong. Which I still do...



Exploding head. I enjoy drawing these.