I began finding my visual style but before I progressed further I wanted to decide on the form that my project would take, I thought about screen prints but I knew it wouldn’t be the most effective means of printing to raise awareness as the process is relatively slow, the uni had announced that they bought a risograph printer and I was very eager to use that but unfortunately it was not set up at this time, I had to settle for digital printing and because working digitally was now on the cards I wanted to experiment with digital drawing, I have lots of experience with digital art but I have done almost all of it in Illustrator, which is vector based and so often times I find my art being very clean and 2D, I wanted to create 2D, simple imagery so to prevent it becoming too simple I wanted to try using texture brushes.

I hadn’t used photoshop for drawing much at all but I knew the basics in using the brush tool and the lasso tool to construct images. I began to draw using the style in my sketchbook along with the colours I tested earlier, I wasn’t trying to produce something accurate to what the final outcome would be, I was just trying to get to grips with photoshop in the context/style that I would be using later on.

I was happy with this rough drawing and liked the texture brush, I thought the colors were a bit too strong in saturation and darkness, but the main issue was the flatness because I was trying to keep everything simple, playful and childish, I felt that having textured brushes made everything too smooth…

So I matched it by making everything else bumpy, I like this as the noise makes everything feel a lot softer which I felt would compliment my subject matter.

I still didn’t feel confident with photoshop so tried to produce a few landscapes using the lasso tool, this was really useful as it boosted my confidence and the extra practice helped speed up my workflow.

This was the first attempt, all of these practice drawings were very quick but my technical flaws and lack of confidence with the lasso tool is very obvious, I was using layers effectively but didn’t realize you could change the lasso tools mode so the selection didn’t have to be a continuous line, I learned this right at the end of this drawing and it really helped.

This is one of my favorites as it has a strong feeling of freedom, relaxation and a lot of depth to it, I really like the composition as I think that along with the pallet is what makes this so successful. Learning how to use the lasso tool was really useful and it helped me create more believable forms, but now as well as using it to fill areas, i started to use it to delete areas too, this helped a lot with creating grass and a good shape for the mountains as I could carve the shape away as if it were a sculpture.

I didn’t learn anything new here technically but I really liked this pallet and planned to use it for my zine.

I was focusing on sprawling landscapes but I wanted to try and achieve more realistic lighting on a more useful perspective, rather than looking at something from a distance I tried to put myself within the landscape, this was a challenge as every shape had a strong effect on the images believability, rim lighting and adding highlights was the most difficult as I had to ensure I knew where the light was coming from, I discovered clipping masks and blending options here to ensure all my coloring was on top of the foundation “within the lines”. Although it wasn’t useful yet I wanted to take this image and use illustrator to add linework, I was starting to see a very 3d world forming so was interested in seeing if this style of simple shape carving would work well with my standard linework.

This was quick but I really like the effect I achieved, learning in this way was very useful as the quality difference from each of these sketches clearly illustrate, I felt very competent and not limited technically. For me, it’s very harmful to feel limited technically as I can get quite frustrated with myself if I don’t change and develop, and using new tools allows me to discover new ideas and effects that are unintentional and more governed by process than intention.