This week I have been collaging and drawing further designs, and have moved to Photoshop to work on even more designs. For two weeks it felt as though I was just creating characters and didn’t have anything to do with them. After a one-to-one crit it was suggested that I work on forming the characters into toile-de-joues type motifs; this turned out to be perfect as I had a design framework within which to place my ideas.
My work in Photoshop is largely intuitive and experimental, playing with blend modes, cropping and layers. My aim is to create compositions that are busy, with mixed media elements, texture and flat colour; things that draw the eye but not to any particular focal point, instead the viewer should be interested in all aspects of the image. My colour choices have so far been decided by the collaged materials I’ve used, however I plan to create some colour studies soon, by painting squares of colour observed in my existing paintings, to put together some more defined, potential colour palettes. This week I went to Amsterdam to visit museums and galleries for research, and whilst not everything was directly related to my work, the idea of adventure and travel was, and it put me in the right mindset to continue with the project. The eighteenth century collections at the Rijksmuseum were very interesting and have given me more ideas for hybrid animals and imagery around the theme of ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that I can include in my work.
From here, I need to begin linking my motifs together by repeating imagery and adding further texture and overlays to the backgrounds.
A Critical Journal. 