Coventry – Week 8

Hi all,

This week has been rather dull in terms of work, as Chloe is still away I went home to Leicester to continue working on my shoe designs and a couple of shoe box designs and see my family. As I’m at home I have access to all of my art supplies so I took the opportunity to experiment with some hand drawn skins. I learnt about skin drawing whilst I was working at Amanda Kelly in London and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try out my skills and see if I have improved.

Normally because of my hand issues I draw everything on my computer as it’s painful drawing on paper. However when trying to draw leopard prints on a computer I haven’t quite mastered how I wanted them to turn out yet so I tried drawing them by hand as I was taught to do in London. I’m personally rather happy with how they turned out, and I hope Bottle Blonde will be equally happy with the designs they are incorporated into. You can see my leopard skin print attempts below.

I also took the opportunity to do some splatter paint prints as this is extremely hard to achieve the same effect on the computer. Unfortunately I didn’t have any neon paint to match in with Bottle Blonde’s colour scheme, however with a bit of Photoshop using some more skills I learnt about prints in London it was easy to change the colours to fit in. Once I had drawn all my different styled leopard prints I scanned them in and got to work. I learnt about how to colour separate patterns whilst working in London but discovered the same tools were extremely useful for changing colours of patterns and smoothly adding hand drawn elements into my prints. Below you can see the original scan of a print and then an example of how I have photoshopped the background and strokes to make sure the print was even.

In my personal life this week as I have been home for the week I went to pottery with my godmother and had great fun painting and molding clay. I decided I wanted to make 3 Brian the snails and I was given a gnome and inspired by my godmother to paint him to look like my boyfriend which turned out wonderfully.