Post crit, post Fred chat notes

This is about the issues raised in the crit and the talk I had with Fred about how I could try to solve them. 

• If I'm drawing people from observation I should try and draw them realistically first and look at the posture with simple lines before I move on to my method of drawing - this will be hard for as What Fred called stylised drawing is just the way of drawing that makes sense to me as I find the more realistic way of drawing makes very little sense to me but it's something I should try to do more of.
• Applying my work to other forms - I've been thinking too much that my illustration Friday work is just about making the quick turn around and responding to a word, without trying to then use it for something else. Not every one of them will be applicable to other resolutions but my squirrel pattern is and I should mock up some cushions, notebooks and wrapping paper with it on (a friend over Facebook actually requested it as a wrapping paper).
• My characters should translate even when you don't know them - my character portraits are accurate and mainly follow how they stand but if you can't understand them if you don't know them, they're not successful.
• I need to be working on a brief that combines the separate skill building briefs at the same time as the skill building ones otherwise it might not translate - this will be hard as it messes up my time plan as I had spread the briefs out to try and keep myself from being stressed. However I talked to Fred about the sculptors daughter brief I had been thinking about dropping and he suggested having the backgrounds I work on separately come from the book and and to simplify my brief to have a colour cover and 5 internal black and white illustrations.

Animal

This week's word was animal and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for it. As I did know that I've been wanting to play with repeating pattern, coloured lines and texture, I decided that I'd use this as an oppurtunity to do that. I drew out some autumn things as I wanted to do a woodland animal theme. I did all the things I normally do to reach a resolved image and then separated the different aspects and played with the line colour. and applying texture. I spent a pretty long time trying to get texture to work on each individual aspect before deciding that that was taking up too much of my time for an illustration friday. I looked up how to apply textures and I found out about the overlay option instead of just multiplying and playing with the opacity. This works a hell of a lot better but can make things a lot lighter and darker in dodgy areas. Though I think this was mainly from the choice of the texture I chose, I shouldn't have such drastically different colours on the same texture. If I want this to work in the future I'll have to make some new textures that don't have such divide. However that being said I think this has come out really well and it's something I should explore further. The coloured lines soften the image considerably and When I published it to my professional social media, it got a lot more attention then my usual work.

Whimsical

This weeks word was Whimsical and I had a bit of trouble thinking of something for it but I remembered something my friend was telling me about a story idea, so I drew that. I also tried doing little white lines on the tiger which I've never really done it before. I think it worked pretty well and I should try it again another time. 

Sarah

Again, while I was working on cop I took break to draw one of my character portraits. Like the last two  I've drawn this in part from life and in part from photo reference. In all the photos I found of her on Instagram she would cover her face with her hands so I thought it'd be fitting to draw her in the same way and to reinforce who it is. I chose to do the background as purple which isn't a colour I use very often but I wanted one different from the others that'd still be complimentary and as she has blonde hair I was thinking a darker colour would work best. I think I've done pretty well with this considering how long it took to work out how to draw the face behind the hands and the hands in that posistion. 

Bouquet

This week's word was bouquet and as I didn't want to draw a bunch of flowers I looked on pinterest for inspiration (like always) and I found a lovely photo of a girl with flowers in her hair. I got a bunch of reference for this idea and then drew my own. I stole the colours for her hair and skin tone from one of my other drawings and I tried a few different colours for the flowers.