Narrative Imagemaking: Final Pieces

It's been a while since I last posted, in that time I've been working towards my final outcomes in textiles, mixed media and narrative imagemaking. I also visited London during half term which proved surprisingly helpful as I visited lots of galleries and came back feeling inspired and ready to work.

For our narrative imagemaking final piece, we had to create 6 pieces using Adobe Illustrator. I have some experience with digital art and I enjoy using drawing tablets so I found this brief really fun to work on!

I chose to center my pieces around an event I went to in the summer- a Japanese culture convention held in London, called Hyper Japan.

 The first piece is taken from this photograph of myself and a Japanese rock band called Lost Ash who I met at the convention.

 First of all, I sketched the picture by hand in my own style of drawing so that I could then scan the image into Illustrator.

Once the image was on illustrator, I created a new layer and worked on top of the image using the pen tool to create an outline.














I then created another layer beneath the outline layer and hid the initial sketch so I could add colour.







After completing the colouring  I added a background and final touches such as highlights and tidying up the linework. Here is the finished piece!

The second piece followed the same process except I realised that after the amount of time the first piece took me, if I tried to add in all the details I had in the sketch then there was no way I'd get all my pieces finished in time.













In the end, I decided to leave out the objects on the table and the extra figure and hope that the image still made sense. I might add them in again if I have time before the final assessment.

This piece was made in the same way as the others, except I decided to add text on top. It says: "おにぎり！おいしい" which means "onigiri! Delicious"














 I decided to give this piece a more graphical look because I thought it would be interesting to experiment with different styles. I also used text with black text behind it to bring it out more and look like a shadow.

I did this piece a little differently as I worked straight over a picture instead of a drawing. I made this piece much more experimental than the other pieces as I used different brushes and a more realistic style but I'm really happy with the outcome.












I also decided after completing the piece that I much preferred it uncropped as I like the splashy paint-like effect it has.

I also worked from a photo with this picture too, except I added some of my own details such as the faces.

My Timeline

For our narrative Image-making lesson, we were asked to complete a timeline of our lives in a way that we found interesting. I took "time-line" very literally and decided to present it like a washing line of sorts, with little cards showing datesx photographs or illustrations, and a word or two about what happened. I tried to include all the major events in my life that I could remember, even though I missed out finishing school and starting college for the sole reason that I was running out of pegs and thought that my other cards looked much more interesting.

Week 1

I survived my first full week of college! *pops party poppers in my room alone*
...Well, it's an achievement for me, at least.

In all seriousness, I've really enjoyed the first week of my course. I feel like I've already learned a lot and I can tell that I'm really going to enjoy the next two years.

On Wednesday, we had textiles where we worked on transferring drawings of buildings we had done at home onto muslin fabric using imagemaker. We then stitched the fabric together and attached metal legs so they would stand up.

 It didn't come out great and the colours were not as vibrant as I'd hoped but it was still a fun experience.

On Thursday, we were given a task to create the alphabet out of any materials we liked. I used a variety of materials, going from the general paint and newspaper to... Blackberries I found outside. Yeah. This one's still a work in progress...

Friday was a lot of fun because we got to create comics! I love manga art and illustration so this sort of thing is right up my street. I decided to make mine about the struggles of waking up in the morning, as we had to illustrate something we had done that morning and frankly I hadn't done anything worth writing about.
I have two other comic strips to finish this week so I'll make sure to post them when they're done.