Talked to my mom abit about my project and she told me more about why we have potted plants around the house near door or at the window. “Different plants are for warding off spirits or to balance the energy of the house,” she said. I got onto the idea of creating a balance in my motifs.
Thus, I spent a bit of time researching into which flora or fauna had superstitions attached to them, and the shortlisted animals/plants are as follow:
Unlucky/Other world animals: Raven, Moth, Black cat, Snake
Lucky plants: Money plant, Snake plant, Jade Plant
First, I found photos online to copy its form. To achieve the images, I printed them out on A4 paper and traced the outline and basic shapes, then adding on my own textures and fine lines as inspired by Mazzoni’s drawings. Next, I scan them into my computer at 400 dpi and images trace the files to edit and clean up the lines. This whole process was to retain a hand drawn effect, but also making it easy to clean up the images.
I also wanted to experiment with more textures than just lines and managed to come up with a few gray swatches using a water tub, gauche, some paper, and alot of testing. Here are the results:
They don’t look much, but with a bit of cleaning up and photo editing etc, these are a few works I’ve come up.
(Post to be finished)
the drawings are great of the raven and butterfly- focus on your drawings now and we can look into the layout of the banner next. As the scale of these motifs can change. The outlines of your drawings are heavy and graphic so not sure that the background textures will work- as of now the texture and drawing are still not complementing each other- or supporting each other well. The textures feel separate from the drawing. I would look into drawing first all of the motifs and deciding on the color for the entire composition. It seems to me that would be better to color in the motif rather than introducing textures..? your motifs could hold color. Please look into Elisabeth’s tutorial into how to color the motif. at the end, we can see if we could support some elements in the banner with your painterly textures – but it is not going to be within the motif. A bit more work for you but you will like the results. Would the textures be great as a guide to outline them or use them as inspiration for some starnge flora? Keep up a good work!!!