Artists I like #11

Upon not having written a blog post in quite sometime, I'm now aiming to do one blog post a week. I most more often on my Instagram because of the ease and instant access.

Anyway, I've been meaning to do this artist for a while after seeing the adverts on television for a couple of years now. They're the adverts for TSB bank. 

I absolutely adore the illustrations in this advert, they're so bright and friendly. From just looking at the videos they seem to be watercolour painted stop frame animation. On the studios website, Studio AKA, it just states that they are hand crafted 2D animations. Doesn't let on too much how they were made but you can see within the clips the change in colours suggesting they were recreated frame by frame. They could also be just computer animated with the affect of watercolour but it's difficult to tell. 

Either way I think the illustrations are lovely but perhaps belong in a children's book rather than a bank advert!

Summer Card Project

I got notified of this event on DeviantArt called the Summer Card Project. It involves creating a card or two with the theme of summer but also a get well/ thinking of you card. The purpose of the cards are to be sent off to hospitals and given to those who are ill or injured from young to old. Summer is my favourite season and I enjoy creating cards so I thought it would be a nice idea to join in.

I wanted to create a card that wasn't purely summer themed (i.e not a bucket or beach) so I decided to pick a sunflower for the element of one card and a bumble bee for the other.

The Bee card is just coloured card stacked up with a hole through two players to reveal the white. I did this with a circle cutter. I then hand drew the bee and coloured with Pro Markers. I used foam stickers to make the bee "float" and did a speech bubble pun related to the bee. The idea is not to say "Get Well Soon" but provide a message that's uplifting. I drew the dotted line and the final card I was pretty pleased with!

The next card I designed involved using watercolours and just doing blog shapes which would then be drawn over with a black fine liner. The "blobs" of paint just suggest the shape of the object with the fine liner defining the shape. The idea isn't supposed to be perfect in-the-line picture but more childish and still looks good. I also have plans to reproduce this card theme and sell them on my Etsy shop!

I'm very happy with both cards and I included my website for whomever receives my card, hopefully they let me know as I'd be excited to find out who receives it! If you want to find out more about the SCP the link is below. It closes on the 31st July so it may be too late for countries outside the US but it happens at Christmas time too so you could participate then as well!

http://madizzlee.deviantart.com/journal/Summer-Card-Project-617277123

Watercolour painting #2

I did another painting with water colour after really enjoying my last one. I did another character from the video game I play and tried my best to really work on the skin colours and shading. Nox is the the Goddess of the Night in Greek mythology. Although I believe in actual mythology it's spelt Nyx. She's believed to have such exceptional power and beauty that she was even feared by Zeus himself. She's a mother to many other Greek
deities such as Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), with Erebus (Darkness).

I posted the image onto the Reddit site for Smite and it was very well received. The community are actually very encouraging and really enjoy fan art. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/4jqnzm/nox_watercolour_painting/ 

I also posted the image on DeviantArt and it's probably my most favourited image so far. I used water colours, acrylic white fine liner, white Indian ink and a gold metallic paint. I will produce many more of the characters as I find their costume and character designs to be really beautiful.

Watercolour painting

Haven't done any water colouring in just over two years, got even some new range of colours and decided to try them out. Previously I had 8 colours whereas now I have a palette of 24! No white though for some reason, so that's done in acrylic watered down as well as an acrylic white pen.  It's quite different style from how I usually draw but I feel like I'm testing my boundaries a bit and building my portfolio of work!

The painting is of a character named Nu Wa from the video game Smite. Nu Wa is the god of humankind in Chinese mythology and I have quite an interest for historical myths and legends so I think it still fits into my work! It was just nice to paint something different and take a break from so much digital work.

Mixed Media - Methodology

I decided to do some work with water colours and incorporate some photography in with the work. So I thought about using my own stock photos mixed with an illustration of a Robin. It was pretty simple pasting it onto the post but I like how easily the Robin fits into place as if it weren't an illustration at all. I think I might try out different styles of drawing and paste it into similar photographs.

 

I like the contrast of the black post and green vegetation against the Orange breast of the Robin. I'll probably add some artists who use mixed media in this style to my sketch book.

 I found an artist called Nithin Rao Kumblekar which produced a whole series of illustrative images mixed with photographs which I love and would definetely try and do some influential images from.