Portraits: Experimentation

Before settling on a final design I wanted to experiment with different media. This included watercolour, watercolour pencils, ink and biro (free hand). So I photocopied some of my last sketches so that I could work on making a mess experimentation.

Watercolour Paint 

Even though I tried adding some colour to this in Photoshop I wanted to create a “cloudy” effect by using watercolour paint.

I first started by preparing the picture; I went around the edges of “sadness” with just water, as this would create the boundary for the paint to flow down. I then dipped my paintbrush in the minimum amount of paint into lots of water, and then dotted it on the paper that I had wetted.

The paint then “followed” down this area, and by taking a piece of scrunched up tissue I patted it slightly to blend all of the blue in.

I used the same method for the rest of the piece, using colours such as red for “anger”, yellow for “happiness” and green for “shock/surprise.” It took me a while to decide on what colour to actually use for shock but after doing some research I came across a page that had a colour wheel of emotions.

Inspirations:
Alice Zhang
Joe Ciardiello
Ralph Steadman
Bohemian Rhapsody

Conclusion:

I love experimenting with watercolour especially if it includes making it a bit messy, and I find it a more effective medium than Photoshop because of how I could just dot the page randomly. I find this more difficult to do in Photoshop as I keep trying to make it perfect… But with a brush I feel “free” to make the piece messy.  
Because of the "messiness" of the piece I feel that this takes away some of the detail for the lines, making it appear more like a fine art piece than an editorial illustration. 

Watercolour Pencils

Unlike paint, I tend to be really neat when working with pencil because I don’t have the ability to be light and free with it, and then dot it with water to make it into paint. However this time I just want to use the pencils for their soft texture rather than using “normal” crayons.

I wanted to try it out on this piece because I want to emphasise the fact that the masks are floating on waves of emotion, so I picked three shades to represent each emotion and started working on “anger”. I started by just picking on shade and randomly colouring in different areas around “anger”, then picked another shade, and then the last shade.

 I repeated the process across all of the emotions. Whenever the different emotions clashed I coloured it so that one flame (for example, sadness) leads onto another (anger) so that they don’t look as if there was a boundary of some sort.

And voila!

Inspirations:
Alice Zhang
Chinese & Greek theatre masks

Conclusion:

I quite like this version of adding a bit of colour as it really brings out the masks a bit more. I think it also emphasises the little “waves”.
But would this be acceptable to be displayed alongside an article? Although it is all bright an colourful, I don't think that this illustration is serious enough to fit with the topic... I'm not too sure just yet though. 

Overall Conclusion:

However I did get it a bit mixed up because the source that I had relied on for the colour scheme said that green stood for surprise and shock, with yellow for happiness, but it is in fact the other way around. Luckily I noticed this during the experimenting stage so if I do happen to take this into my final piece then I’ll know to research into emotional colour wheels a bit more.

Biro (freehand)

One of my lecturers picked up one of my first sketches I had done for this project, so I wanted to try it out by referencing from one of my pieces.

I did this by not creating any sort of facial structure for each of the faces but went "freehand" so I just drew with biro and made sure that my hand didn't lift from the page. 

Inspirations:
Ralph Steadman

Conclusion:

I really like this because of how messy and "free" the lines are, yet I feel that it doesn't have the same meaning behind it as one of my previous ideas. Though it was still lovely to experiment with biro!