I found some bright orange Adidas shorts on the Re-Fashion website. I think being in lockdown has made myself and everyone else, really crave being on holiday or in another country care free. I saw these shorts and they instantly made me think of a hot Spanish summer. The bright orange colour reminded me of Seville oranges and I wanted nothing more than to be wearing these shorts roaming around the Spanish country side.

At this point, I had ordered some paint markets and a large sketchbook to start my pieces in. I had also bought myself a scanner which meant I could scan the work I created in my sketchbook into my laptop and work from there, which I think is how I work best. I started drawing the shorts and surrounded by Seville oranges and the orange fruit. It was a really nice change to be working by hand instead of using a digital drawing pad and I instantly felt more inspired.

Finished paintings (I regret adding purple as the white really makes the orange pop);

The next stage was to scan this piece in and work on it in photoshop:

I wanted to add text to make this piece more interesting. I also decided against the purple background and decided a bright light blue looked best. For the text I wanted to word ‘Verano’ as this means summer in Spanish, I look a while selecting the right font as it was really important that the font kept inline with the Spanish theme. I played around a lot with he text style and positioning, and got to a point where I decided to start to create some gifs and moving images- because the work I am currently producing are posters to be exhibited- but with the current circumstances I am exhibiting my own work on instagram, so its a good idea to make my work as captivating as I can for an online audience.

The finished static poster;

Experimental Gifs using PhotoMosh;

Final Gif made using photoshop;

I am really pleased with how this poster turned out, I think its something really different to my usual style and it was really interesting to make gifs as its something I haven’t done much of before. I think this piece in particular worked so well as it was a mix of using hand painted/drawn elements and I was sable to push and experiment with this in photoshop. Making gifs encouraged me to revisit a previous poster I made and experiment with this on Photo Mosh.