Final Portfolio. Part 1: Exercises

And here it is: the culmination of the entire semester coming down to this blog post.
I'm going to start this out with some of the exercises we did. Hopefully in order.

As I'm sure you remember, line art. I really liked doing these.  I felt like I got a style sort of going when doing these and can definitely see how this would be beneficial later on in life. 

Yep, same sort of thing again. Taking a photograph and throwing some line art around is pretty cool. And you can definitely choose the focus, unlike with live trace. This does com up with some cool result.

And then there's the whole "doing this in photoshop" way. When I was doing this at first, it sorta sucked. The only this I really liked better about this than being able to vary the line weight but more so being able to erase when I messed something up. It also made the whole tracing thing easier, but getting a straight line with the mouse (or the tablet for that matter). 

[And the reason this looks so weird is because I lost the original file when my flash drive corrupted and I had to scan in what I printed, which wasn't great resolution because of all the crap I had to go through to print it]

Line art and wash. Wash and line art. This was a pattern that continued for a while. In this case, the line art was laid down first, and the wash afterwards. This is still a little tight, but I was really starting to loosen up my watercolor at this point. I like some of the cool things the wash did.

This was also done with line art first and wash second. I, again, like how the paint is doing it's own thing in some places. It looks kind of neat, I do believe.

Wash wash wash wash. This is just that. I don't necessarily want to say this was around when I got my "aha" moment, just because this still isn't that that great, but this was a point that I started to realize that the colors you use within the painting can transfer well despite them not actually being in the piece. There were actually a lot of little tricks like that I learned just from looking around at peoples' work. In this one, you can see a little blue being worked into the black section. I think that worked pretty well.

This is when I started experimenting more with painted and implied line, in way of the chips and such. And in the bigger copy you can see more of the exciting colors within the chips, seeing the shadows and such. And that salsa... looking good.

Oh, fish. This was a pretty controlled water color, just in the fact their couldn't be all that much color mixing; I didn't want there to be all this muddy color. But with pulling out a little of the orange and letting the blue in the background... that's what this one is all about.

This one was fun. This little watercolor exercise didn't require too much precision or anything... who really knows what sushi looks like anyways? What I really like about it, though, is the cool little painterly situations within the plate and seaweed of the sushi.

And, airbrush. Second fruit, I really feel like this turned out pretty well. Airbrush is obviously not the most forgiving or simple medium, but i think this still went over okay. In all, though, bananas are pretty simple. And airbrush can be kind of fun.

And finally: the marker comp.

This was the comp I did for my album cover. I obviously changed the initial idea, but all the same, a little thing like this is very helpful in the grand scene of things. In the beginning, such comps did really annoy me, but then I started to realize that they are very beneficial to the end result. I plan on sketching my way through the process in the future.