For the second round assignment we were asked to create a metal tin or multiple tins that would represent a style or look that "Our Muse Antoinette" might purchase for her small boutique.
I was very excited about the parameters of the assignment and had an idea right away about what I wanted to create. I knew that I wanted to do a set of nesting tins and it would be based on a theme that had it’s origins in a phrase or saying. I have recently been working with flowers and birds in my art so with that being fresh on the brain, I started thinking about a phrase that related to nature. The feeling you get when you are deep inside the forest surrounded by the lush canopy that muffles the sounds of the city, feeling small in its splendor. The phrase kinda wrote it self- "Find enchantment deep inside the forest." I did tweaked it somewhat, until I could break it into three sections that would make sense on their own, Find Enchantment, Deep Inside, The Forest. Once I had the phrase the overall sketch for the design came rather quickly.
I was very excited about the parameters of the assignment and had an idea right away about what I wanted to create. I knew that I wanted to do a set of nesting tins and it would be based on a theme that had it’s origins in a phrase or saying. I have recently been working with flowers and birds in my art so with that being fresh on the brain, I started thinking about a phrase that related to nature. The feeling you get when you are deep inside the forest surrounded by the lush canopy that muffles the sounds of the city, feeling small in its splendor. The phrase kinda wrote it self- "Find enchantment deep inside the forest." I did tweaked it somewhat, until I could break it into three sections that would make sense on their own, Find Enchantment, Deep Inside, The Forest. Once I had the phrase the overall sketch for the design came rather quickly.
Although, I do some work using traditional media, my work is primarily digital, My typical process progression would be to first sketch out the overall design just to visualize the space and then take it into the computer. Theses sketches are usually very rough and at times unreadable even for me. Once I have a pretty good idea of how the composition should be laid out, I then start sketching the individual elements. These are also pretty rough but detailed enough to bring into Adobe Illustrator to redraw digitally, before taking them into Adobe Photoshop to paint. Here are a couple of examples of the sketch, the vector shapes and the final digital painting of both the peacock and fawn I used for my tins.
I love texture and have cultivated and developed a series of brushes in Photoshop to paint in the texture with. I'm also layer crazy and tend to get a little carried away using the blend modes that optically change objects on the layers below. Blend modes help to do things like make the color more luminous or change the hue or saturation of the objects below. At times, I get so caught up in using blend modes, that even a small shadow ends up taking 3 times longer than it should. I don’t mind though, I get so lost in the process that I never really think of it as being work.
Although I do use Adobe Illustrator to redraw and create the shapes that I bring into Photoshop to paint, there are times that I need a texture or a delicate line, like in the case of the bird’s nest below, that is more difficult to achieve using the software, so I will sketch or paint these elements using traditional media first. These sketches or little paintings are more developed then my typical sketches and I scan them in at a higher resolution to use directly in my digital painting. For the nest, I removed the white background of the page using the Channels palette in Photoshop. The Channels palette allows you to select the white of the page and delete it so that the background becomes transparent without losing any of the detail of the sketch. Once the background is removed I can then change the color of the line work and paint over it with my texture and airbrush brushes to get the final effect.
Lately, I have been working on my overall presentation and it made sense to me to stack the tins and keep the neutral background more simple since my designs are fairly detailed.
The public voting round lasts through Monday 9/21/2015 and the 6 finalists will be announced on Wednesday 9/23/2015. This is such an exciting opportunity. I so appreciate your support. Thanks again! Diane
2 comments:
Diane, thank you so much for sharing your process - I already voted for you, your work is amazing! Even though the compliment comes late, but I LOVED your little terrarium for GTS 2014! Good luck!
Thanks so much Susanne, I really appreciate your kind words.
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