Away for a Week and Job Interview

Just thought I'd post to let you know that I will be away for a week in the Lake District. I'm hoping to do lots more life drawing.

What a busy week I've had but the highlight has to be my interview for a Designer position with a large-scale mosaic company. I prepared pretty well with lots of research. This wasn't difficult because the company was so interesting and their designs were amazing. I also researched possible interview questions and prepared for this also using this link http://home.design.iastate.edu/CareerServices/files/GR_interview_questions.pdf. On the day, however my answers just disappeared when the inevitable question paper came out, but I'm hoping that I covered everything in my nervous ramblings and that my portfolio showed all my strengths. David the Design Director was really interested in art and really liked my work, he would be a great inspiration in my personal development. So fingers crossed. I hope I can enjoy my holiday without thinking about this too much.

(Gutted, didn't get the job).

Summerhill Glen, Douglas, Isle of Man

Dolphin Rocks, Summerhill Glen.

I took some of my art materials with me whilst visiting the Isle of Man, and had the opportunity to create a couple of life drawings. I completed most of the work during my stay but added dark acrylic paint on my return. These two pieces are created using mixed media and consist of pen, graphite crayon, black watercolour pencil/paint and acrylic paint.

I really enjoyed creating these pieces and will certainly make time to do some more life drawing in September, when I visit the Lake District. This will be good experience as I haven't actually done any landscape drawing. I'm hoping to continue my exploration of mark making to create some new and interesting pieces.

Stairway, Summerhill Glen.

Prints of these images will be up for
sale shortly on my online shops.

SunSwallow

I've been working this week on a commission for a lady in America who wanted a creature created by mixing a sunfish and a swallow. There is a lovely story to go with this and although the artwork was meant as a surprise for her partner, she couldn't wait to show him. I decided to take some photos along the way so that she could see the process involved in making her artwork.

1. First some of my better roughs were emailed and a design selected.

2. Original Drawing scanned, printed larger and then transferred to paper using Tracedown.

3. Original markings erased so that image just shows through - enough to make an ink outline, using pen. 

4. The start of shading in the image using pen. 

5. The final artwork which is then scanned and opened in Photoshop.

6. SunSwallow selected and background deleted. I used a mask and brush tool to tidy up the edges of the image, duplicated the layer and adjusted the histogram and contrast to match the original more closely.

7. The original document was saved, flattened and then dragged to a new document with the required image size. The outside of the image was cropped and then the final image saved. The original .psd file remains intact with all its layers. 

SunSwallow by Maria Forrester