#gd&i

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Self portrait @ the age of 12

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Digital portrait. Inspiration was taken from Cicely Mary Barker’s flower fairies. 

Hannah (the subject) is a watercolour painter and likes sketching fantasy creatures. She’s also involved in Thailand outreach and loves cooking, hence the thai basil growing out of her hair. 

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Literary Atlas Typographic Design

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PORTRAIT II

Oh hey, here we are again, procrastinating via art.

This time I wanted to try a softer, more melancholy mood, so I chose this shot of Cliff Curtis. I have no idea where it’s from. He’s way more flat-lit than the reference I used of Ejiofer, and he’s not looking straight-on which is a wee bit more challenging. 

Got a bit lost in my layers, but it took me less time than the last one. Probs about 6 hours total. Let’s look at some progress:

Sometimes I think I should just posterise the image and blend it that way. But that would be cheating.

Critique: “His eyes are too light”. Yeah, I know - I was gonna keep em light for the lolz but Curtis’ skin tone is a wee bit dark.

Hair was the most difficult part, and always is. At this stage I can see I didn’t light the face quite right, and the reference image is tilted further back than mine. 

Adding colour - my friend pointed out how green it was, and I argued it was cos the reference image is green. Green is never nice, though, unless you want a sickly look, but that’s not what I’m going for.

Adding in the background. It never really occurred to me that there’s specific brushes for skin texturing. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, but let’s blame my lack of brain function on the flu. I downloaded some random brushes and gave them a whirl - 

Still shading, still adding some redness. I think my main things to work on are always proportion and lighting. This is closer to my reference than the last portrait, but I guess I intentionally went a bit AWOL with the last one.

I promise next time I’ll do a portrait of a woman, just to even things out.

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Chest-of-Drawers Complete!

Despite the surrounding trepidation, it worked. I managed to painted a rearrangeable image onto my three drawers of three different faces. Let’s have a look at the progress...

Sketching on the outlines. I did this by laying paper overtop and using a pencil to carve a small groove in the wood.

Mixing the paint was the part I was worried most about. All I had (and could rightfully afford) were $3 primary colour acrylics from the Ware Whare. I had a big tub of good-quality white paint from Gordon Harris, and found the more I mixed that into the cheap paint, the better it went on the wood.

I thought painting each face neutral blue, warm blue, and cold blue would be a challenge when it came to the blended sections, but it was really just a matter of adding a few drops of blue here and there.

I’d planned to paint the outline in brown, but all my brown paint is up north with the rest of my art supplies. Also, it’s a very geometric image, so I ended up using a sharpie and a ruler. 

Almost everyone can spot the girl’s face. Giving her eye a pupil helped, and like I intended, the organic shape of her hair blowing ahead of her helps people spot the shape of her profile. 

The girl is the central image, but when you have the drawers centred on her you can’t see the other two faces. Rearrange it any other way and you can see all three faces at once:

The key to spotting these (very abstract) faces is to identify each different shade of blue. One man is purple-blue, the other a neutral blue, and the girl’s a green-blue. BUT I’ve been nice and highlighted them anyway:

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PORTRAIT I

Based off a photograph of Chitewel Ejiofer, this was one of my first experiments with digital illustration. I used the photograph mainly for proportions and lighting rather than a direct reference, but you can see my progress:

Colour was probably my greatest challenge because I’m still learning how to overlay colour, although a lot of it is pretty intuitive. I learnt that drawing curly hair is both tedious and hard, as is drawing a beard when you’ve never had one.

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Culture & Context Exhibition Poster

There was a poster competition running for a theory paper last trimester. I quickly whipped this up as a bit of a joke, planting my lecturer’s face in the centre of 60s psychedelia, and it was so popular with the class it won.

The funniest part about it was probably the fact that my lecturer had to go round campus sticking up posters of himself everywhere. Inadvertent narcissism.

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Fairlie Odd Films

I volunteered to design the posters and DVD sleeves for this years’ 300-level documentary screening. Bringing together four very diverse films (both in terms of style and content) onto one poster was a challenge, but I solved it by basing the four-strip design off another film festival poster and adding my own palette.