Response to Tutor Feedback Part 3

 Overall your response to part three has shown a determination to get the work done. You have tackled the exercises and assignment and it looks like you have enjoyed yourself along the way. This is a really positive step forward.

You are starting to present a greater variety of mixed media starting points but this is still an area to keep developing.

You are also starting to develop a delicate colour palette – just be careful that your work doesn’t start to look too similar because of the colours that you are using. Think about your audience and test your colour schemes out carefully.

I enjoyed the first exercise on exploring composition. It was a fun way to test out the ideas by printing the elements at different scales and mixing them up to see how that influenced the final feel of the picture.

The next exercise was to describe elements of an illustration including the most prominent elements and my tutor seemed pleased with how I approached this task. I found it quite enjoyable and not too difficult.

I found the image development exercise interesting. It was fun to see how you could develop an illustration from something completely different and then turn that into a poster. My tutor advised me about not using all capitol letters for titles and this is something I corrected on future work at the final stages.

For the abstract illustration exercise we were to create a piece based on listening to a specific piece of music. This is something I thought I would really enjoy since I have worked this way before in my college course and also in my own personal work. Perhaps my work has evolved since then as I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought and found it not as easy either.

I liked the colours and strokes I came up with but wasn't sure I like the final piece. I was also trying out different mediums and wasn't used to how they performed so found this a little frustrating on my first attempt.
My tutor suggested I consider some different crops of the image to test against the one I'd chosen.

I really enjoyed the giving instructions exercise. It was the first time I had done an illustration in this way and wanted to use digital painting to complete the final piece. I started with a sketch I created in pencil which I then transferred to my tablet and continued to completion.
I was really pleased with how my final illustration came out, it was one of my first more detailed digital pieces and although it needs a bit more  tweaking and cleaning up I really pleased with the outcome.
Based on my tutors advice I changed the font to something more readable.

The view point exercise I chose to do pencil drawings of strawberries at different angles and crops. I like working in coloured pencils and like using the cross hatching technique.

Learning about creating visuals for the next exercise was really challenging for me. I found simplifying the illustrations really hard and my tutor suggested I could simplify them even further still. This is a skill I need to work on and get my head around how to effectively do this without losing information for the final piece.

Creating a mock up for a book cover was one of my favourite exercises so far. I chose to re-create a book cover based on the Prayer book by Timothy Keller. The original design had quite a masculine feel to it and I decided to make it more feminine to appeal to a female audience. I wanted it to have quite a heavenly, soft look and so used my oil painting as a background mixed with digital text to complete the look. This is one of my favourite pieces of work so far and I took on board my tutors comments to make the text stand out by the use of shadows, so I added those in and I also added some other colour ideas based on my tutors feedback.

Assignment 3 was again another of my favourite pieces of work. I chose to create a music poster for one of my favourite singers and used my knowledge of her personality to choose the colour scheme and feel of the overall piece.

 It would be good to see your mind-maps extended further by making links between other areas in the mind-map. You could highlight the most interesting parts and then extend these as additional mind-maps or lists of words.

• it would be good to see more alternative layouts being tested in your sketchbook and then being moved onto digital testing. This can also be recorded in your sketchbook.

• it would be helpful to see a greater variety of mixed media backgrounds being tested before you decide in your final. This could test other marks and colour schemes

• it would be beneficial to see other type styles and positioning tested. Try and avoid the over use of capital letters and test out the type in a variety of sizes.

I did try to develop different layout outs before getting to the final design but I think this is something I still need to work on to develop further. I again forgot about not using all capital letters so this is something I need to improve on.

I still need to work on developing my ideas, I tend to get an image in my head of what I want the final piece to look like and then struggle to test out other ideas. This is something to continue to work on.

My tutor sent me some links to explore which I looked into as well.