Exercise: Identifying tools and materials

14/10/2020

The idea of this exercise is to look for illustrators who use a particular medium and that we like, catalogue them according to similarities and the way they use their tools. Then we were asked to choose one image that we really liked and write about it.

Finally we should take an older visual and render it using the same material as our chosen artist. This last part of the process we should repeat with a very different artwork.

For my first round, I chose several illustrators, by coincidence all females; who work a lot with dry mixed-media, such as: pencil colors, markers and oil pastels. Specifically I chose an artowork from British illustrator Nina Cosford.

Reference image nr. 1 by illustrator Nina Cosford

Reference image from Nina Cosford website

I chose the above image from her series "Girl!" because I appreciate the story and the message that's being delivered, which I find witty and smart but the overall piece is not overcomplicated. I find it very spontaneous, even with a "sketch" style to it, however it also looks like a final piece that could be in a magazine, book or a piece of stationary.

The color palette is reduced and the whole image is a simplified version of reality. For this exercise I was very lucky to find an online workshop/class from Nina herself where I could follow along her process.

Overall I'm happy with my results, however I do see that I'm losing a lot of quality when I scanned in my images, and in this specific piece I also feel that the final result is too similar to the one of the artists, but it was definetly a good practice.

My personal artwork using the same materials: process and final piece

Reference image nr. 2 by illustrator Gemma Román

Reference image from Gemma Román Instagram

What I like about Gemma's illustrations is the use of color and textures. In this case I had the opportunity to take her Domestika course (not all) but I could see how she sketches manually and paints digitally in Photoshop, which is something I wanted to do since long time ago.

I took a picture of a page of my sketchbook and painted on top of it in Ps, then added some extra elements. Finally, I did a few color variations until I was happy with the result. I'm sure this is a technique I'll be using in the future.

My personal artwork using the same materials: the process