Initial brainstorming and rough sketches:

At this stage, i was pretty much just doodling ideas that were in my head and identifying which ones worked and which didn’t.

TRAVELLER

The idea for this piece was to mimic contour lines. The first sketch I did above was a little too uniform and the letters were kinda hard to decipher. After consulting with Shirley, i figured that i needed to play around with the distances between the lines to create more tension and also add in little details such as the numbers to represent height. I also came up with 2 possible styles that i could do this piece in. The first one makes use of alternating red and blue pencil lines to give off a simple and clean sketchy feel. The second one uses black outlines and colours which would make the piece look more “cartoonish” and vibrant. The colours also helped to define the letters more.

I tried out both styles but couldn’t decide which one to use as my final piece because i liked both. I went with the coloured one in the end because i felt that it was more exciting to look at.

When i first started working on this piece, i didn’t quite like the unevenness of the copic markers and considered using watercolour instead. But Shirley suggested that the unevenness might be a good thing because it added texture to the piece. It was appropriate because resembled the texture of mountains and land. So, i went ahead and added more texture to it.

GUITARIST

For this piece, i morphed the body of a guitar to form the letters to my name. First, i drew out the basic shapes in illustrator and adjusted until i was happy with it. Then, i added the wood texture unto the shapes and varied the colour and gradient of each letter to give the composition more depth.

CAREFREE

Here, I’m coming up with ways i could use butterfly wings to form the letters of my name.

Here, is the final sketch that i decided to use. In terms of medium, i chose to use tracing paper for the wings because of its translucent quality that is similar to butterfly wings.

I tested out whether copic markers could work on tracing paper and fortunately, it did! I drew out each letter on tracing paper and carefully cut them out. For the background, i used watercolour and painted light washes of blue and purple to recreate the sky. I then stuck the wings on only partially for a fluttering effect.

TART BAKER

My initial idea for this was to keep the circular crust of fruit tarts and use the fruits to form the letters. Later on, Shirley suggested that it would be better if the crust could form the letters.

I’m going digital for this piece. So first, i painted some fruits in photoshop.

Then i duplicate and arranged them accordingly. I used a red checkered background to give the feeling of a picnic and used the shadows casted by the trees to frame the composition. Finally, i adjusted the contrast, saturation and colour balance.

★★★