Studio Brief 3 - Persons of Note MEDIA TESTING

 

MEDIA PLAY

Developing on my sketches, I have started to play with media, developing my images towards more refined outcomes. I have carried out some testing with gouache, duplicating some imagery explored in my sketches. The gouache only tests work well to achieve strong colour values, but I would like to achieve more textural details in my images and so would want to develop this with another media if I was to apply gouache to my final outcomes. 

Responding to this, I have explored a reduction of my sketches to their most basic shapes, creating a base for textural overlays. Here the gouache has worked to achieve natural tonal variations from the brush strokes, but in much more refined and simplistic shapes. I have then been exploring how textural details and further visual clues can be over-layed on tracing paper.  I feel that this sense of layering is key to the narrative, with both characters wondering who the other really is. The tracing paper has provided the perfect outlet for textural details, allowing me to build the foliage surrounding the characters and information to the characters themselves. 

While the tracing paper works effectively within the sketchbook as a means of revealing layers, to achieve this overlay in my final outcomes, I would need to explore digital layering, perhaps using the textural details as a sort of screen-print effect over the basic shapes.

 

I also have carried out the same process but using cut paper. The block colours work really well to achieve strong and immediate shapes, but I do feel the gouache offered a subtle texture complimentary to the tone of voice. In light of this, I think I may not explore cut paper but from made textures, cutting out these refined shapes from gouache painted paper in order to attain the sleek values of cut-paper, alongside the subtle painterly textures. 

  

VISUAL DEVICES

I have also been considering the visual devices I can use to communicate their mutual wondering and spying. From my research I feel that Alan in confined by his desk and the bay window, and Miss Shepherd confined by her van. For this reason I would like the image to capture both character simultaneously prying, but within the space that defines them. I have been playing around with reduced information, seeing whether just basic window shapes can reveal enough about their environment without impeding on the weight of the characters. Particularly in the image of Miss Shepherd, she is looking out of the van, yet I have challenged this view of her by using overlapping lines to gesture the van, as opposed to full shapes. I feel that this works well as a visual clue, without detracting her place in the scene.