Evaluation and Reflection of the OLIO Module

The tasks for Olio in producing a visual illustration of a given proverb could have gone either way in terms of difficulty in terms of difficulty and luckily I was given a proverb that easily sparked some ideas in illustrating. Producing the presentation roughs for the proverb and the illustration cover was time consuming, considering the fact that it will take some time to finish creating the final artwork, I had spent more time than usual at the rough stage of the illustrations. This was to balance out the workload on the remaining time I have left when it comes to the finished pieces at some point later in the year. Doing quick roughs and hand those in for deadline would mean I would need to spend a lot more time in producing the artworks which could end up ruining my time management for my other modules in the next term or so.

I am confident with the ideas I had expressed for the proverb and felt they are strongly suitable as outcomes. While they somewhat look literal and not ambiguous, the artworks do show some connection to the proverb as a form of narrative (“God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks”). I could of have looked in a different direction in exploring the proverb, though the information outside the obvious may not translate as well for the visual ideas/design.  

I may have spent too much time on the presentation roughs (as they look like the final artworks) though I didn’t want to risk leaving it to the point where a lot of work needs to be done at a later time. This is perhaps the only thing that may have hindered my progression for the module, as I was probably being a little too cautious with the outcomes. Other than that, everything went well.

OLIO - Self-Portrait

For the self-portrait illustration I only want to approach it with a very simple composition and so I went with the side of my head/face. I had not used any photo references of myself so there may be some facial features that might look a little exaggerated. I had not done a self-portrait with digital painting before so I was having some slight difficulties, such as painting the skin and getting some of the proportions right. I did not want to create a realistic digital painting of myself and just went with what my digital painting skills takes me in terms of style and painting. I had went through the process of painting with low expectations due to the lack of experience in painting faces/portraits on Photoshop. The result came out a bit better than I had expected and as I had said before, the face feels a bit stylised (due to my art style) but that is something I do not want to change since the style, over my experience in digital painting, is now my visual language as an digital artist.

Step by step progress of my self-portrait. 

OLIO - Cover Design Part 2

Starting from where I had left off from the presentation rough of my Olio cover illustration I proceed to mix in colours to give the painting a wide variety of different tones and shades. Colour mixing is one of the methods I go through with most of my artworks in the early colouring stage as I like to keep my colour range as broad as possible for experimenting colours and tones, rather than sticking to the palette of the flat colours.

Rough drafting.

Line work.

Layer separations.

Flat colouring. 

Colour mixing stage.

Tone and shading.

Colour refinement.

It may look near polished in terms of completion though this is not the final artwork and the reason for it be at this stage is because I tend to spend quite a lot of time producing/polishing final artworks, so I decided to spend a little more time on it than usual. When it comes to actually finish the illustration I would only have to polish things up, where I would have a lot more time on.