So... it's time to update you on my progress. The surprising thing for me is that there's been any progress at all with how I've been feeling lately, which is nice! I've been continuing my daily meditations as much as I can and I've added 30 min of cycling (indoors) every other day - time to think about shedding that extra winter weight! There hasn't been as much creative work as I would've liked, or that I even scheduled for, but there has been some movement.
I've also been thinking that while I have all this theoretical education concerning how to use programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, and how to use colour effectively, and how to combine fonts, I don't have a lot of practical experience. So in an effort to correct this, I started researching various tutorials on Illustrator and creating characters and shapes in vector. There are a lot of really good sites out there. I even managed to finish one and I have another planned for this week too!
Let's take a look at my work this past few weeks:
 |
| I started a new negative painting in water-colour. It's the same subject as my last one, with orange berries, but I made a colour change by swapping out the violet in the previous painting with phthalo blue. I'm trying to get a feeling of light in this one. |
 |
| Here you get a better sense of the texture I added with alcohol and water drops when the paint was still wet in the first step. I've started cutting shapes into the piece. |
 |
| Lots of shape work here. The leaves are coming along nicely I think, but I don't like the group of berries on the bottom-right corner, they look very forced. I'd also like to see more variation in terms of contrast in the whole piece. |
 |
| The finished piece. I lightened up the edges of the bottom-right corner bunch of berries to send it to the back and be less prominent. I've also added more darks and lifted a few lights for better contrast and did a bit of positive painting to improve the colour of the fruit. I admit that I was very worried that this experiment would turn out anything I liked at several points in the process, and while I'm not sure I completely achieved what I set out to do, I'm still happy with how it turned out! |
 |
| In the midst of all this painting, I got a card from my sister in the mail and for the first time ever, got the urge to doodle a sort of mandala-type drawing. I only did the flap because I thought that would be more interesting, plus I had to go do other things so couldn't work on it more. I like how "spring" it is! |
 |
| I found a really sweet tutorial for this little fox done in Illustrator and I just had to try it out! The only trouble I had was with the background texture - I couldn't get the opacity to work the way the tutorial said, no matter what I tried. Still, he's awfully cute isn't he?! |
So that's how the past few weeks have gone for me. By the way, if you're interested in trying out the little fox tutorial you can click here to go to it (a new window will open up). It is a beginner project and works well with the lower versions of CS. My next tutorial is on creating vector characters with swappable features. I'm really looking forward to it! I'm a bit stumped for my next painting, so I did a bunch of google searches to see what people have done with negative painting. I created a new board in Pinterest with a bunch of inspiration! Click here if you'd like to have a look.
And that's all for this post! February looks to be leaving like a lamb, so here's hoping March is beautiful!
Have a good one my friend!
Until next time,
Mandy
If you'd like to see more of my work or keep up with me day-to-day you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook.
If you're interested in commissioning me or working with me for graphic work, click here to be taken to my Contact page to send me an email or message me from my social media links above, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)
No comments:
Post a Comment