Development

Once I had decided that the colours from the African mood board were the best to work with, I looked into my colour pallet further. I wanted to find some images I could work from that had both the bright vibrant and the dull muted colours in it, so that I could see them working together. After looking through various books and journals I came up with the images below to work from.

Once I had established my colour scheme I wanted to find more information to draw from using China as my theme. During one of my tutorials I was told there were several Sotheby's catalogues on Chinese contemporary art. This was something I was very interested in therefore I researched the catalogues, the most inspiring pieces of work I found were the paintings of flowers. The textures and marks made are very interesting, it is a very effective way to draw natural objects as the tone and marks give the image a very unrefined feel. 

This effect is something I would like to achieve in my own work, so I began creating some drawings of flowers using various media and mark making techniques. The image below is a collection of the ones I liked best.

During this stage of the project we had the opportunity to have a one to one tutorial with a designer from the Diane Harrison studio. I found this very useful as it gave me an insight into what someone from the design world thought about my work. He advised me to take a little more time with my drawings and focus on one image for a longer period of time, so that I could ensure the dimensions etc were correct. He also advised that I look at some more artists drawings of flowers to give me a greater understanding of what works well. Below are images of the artists work I looked into.

Georgia O’Keeffe

I was inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s work as I feel the bold colours she uses have a similar effect to those I want achieve in my drawings. I also find the shapes of the flowers she draws interesting as they have a great feeling of depth and movement.  

Odillon Redon’s

It was more the positioning of the flowers in Odillon Redon’s that inspired me and it was suggested to me by my tutor that this could be something to consider once designing in photoshop. As I wanted to build up the interesting surface and detailed design that Odillon Redon had created in his paintings.

I came up with the drawings below after evaluating my previous ones and looking into the artists work. I feel that these work much better overall. 

On reflection I feel that the majority of my drawings worked fairly well, although I feel I lost a lot of the free unrefined marks (like those in the Chinese drawings) I had intended to achieve. My images are not as free flowing or as natural looking. However they are original and I feel the mark making techniques I used were effective they create a nice surface and interesting texture, which should translate well into photoshop. I also feel that evaluating the first group of images helped me greatly with creating the second as the second group are positioned better and look to be finished off to a higher standard.