SQUARE BOYS colour combos

Once I had got my pencil drawings scanned in and made them into block shapes it was easy for me to change up the colours to see which I liked best. At first I thought about trying to keep it very minimal by first experimenting with only three colours, and then five colours. I also used black within both of these as I just had it in my head that it was a colour I was going to use. 

I quickly realised that the more colours I used the better the image looked, and the better it would probably look as a screen print. I thought about going with the five colours but I thought it wouldn't be that much more difficult to do six colours. I got rid of the black completely as I felt it was over-powering the image too much, and swapped in a dark green and a dark blue. As soon as I saw the colour way below I knew that was the one I wanted to go for!

FINAL COLOUR WAY

SQUARE BOYS

• something i've been experimenting with recently is drawing my figures in the constraints of a shape. I started off using a triangle as my shape but quickly moved on to a square as I could come up with something a little more fun
• I wanted to try this as I was finding it difficult to just draw onto a black sheet of paper, this helped me have a few restrictions which actually made it easier 
• I tried my best to fill the entire shape with an image, which in turn made for slightly wackier illustrations which is what I love about these. I used line drawings to create them but I'm already seeing potential of turning them into block shapes using bright colours, and possibly even a screen print.

3 COLOUR SCREEN PRINT

FINAL SCREENPRINTS

• here's my final three colour screen prints ! i'm pretty chuffed. the whole process went much smoother than expected, and that I remembered. 
• the process itself was a bit stressful at first while I was getting into it, but I made sure to keep telling myself it was ok if something went wrong which helped 
• I also made sure not to rush it and took my time with things like mixing my inks and lining up each colour so they fit together perfectly; this did take a little longer but it was definitely worth it
• I printed on two different colour stocks to mix it up a bit

WHAT I LIKE:

• I really like the colours I went for. they are bright and compliment each other nicely
• I have really enjoyed seeing my illustration being translated into a screen print and actually liking it! it has made me feel a lot better and so much more confident about the whole process and excited about what I could do next
• I like the illustration itself, it's quite charming and works well as a print. I'm looking forward to giving a couple out to my family and friends as gifts. it will also be good to potentially sell at any future print fairs

FAILURES?

• something you can't really tell from the scans is that the edges of the people are very slightly pixellated. I think this is due to making my positives in Photoshop instead of illustrator, which meant that when I changed them to black the lines weren't clean. i need to get into using illustrator especially for things like this! i'm just so comfortable using Photoshop it's hard to make the switch
• I should have thought about blowing it up a bit. I think it would work well as a large print! but I guess I needed to start off small while I'm getting used to printing

Planning a screen print

I've decided to attempt my first screen print of the year! I feel like this is a risky move considering nearly every screen print i've done in the past something has gone wrong! It's something i'm determined to get good at as I love the aesthetic of it, and think it would really suit my work. So i'm testing the waters really, it might put me off for life but I'm hoping it will go smoothly and I can continue screen printing in the future!

I've gone with something pretty simple, I wanted to avoid overcomplicating it at all costs to keep it as stress-free as possible. I thought this would make quite a nice little three colour print. I made it about A5 size but I'm going to print it on A4 paper in the middle of the page, this means hopefully I can fit all three positives on one screen. 

I've done it almost jigsaw puzzle-like, though I am going to overlay a couple of bits on top of each other to make it a bit easier. I'm going to use blue, pale pink and red, and it'll hopefully turn out like my digital mock-up at the top.  I'm excited (& nervous) to see how it goes!

MAKING A GIF

Recently I thought i'd have a go at making a gif, as I remembered how much I enjoyed our gif making project in first year! I wanted to make something pretty simple as I didn't want it to become a huge project; I just wanted to make a quick experimentation. I obviously wanted to include a figure so I thought about what sort of movements it could make and decided on a simple leg swing and tapping hand. As my animation skills are pretty basic, I decided to draw out each frame individually and I wanted to keep the colour scheme simple as well so just used a blue colouring pencil. Once I had it scanned in though I did add a couple of sections of block colour. 

• I'm happy with my final gif even though it does look a bit make-shift
• I especially like the colouring pencil texture on her hair which changes throughout. This shows that each frame is hand-drawn which I like
• it does look a bit scrappy but i'm not sure if this kind of adds to it? I can't decide if it just looks a bit rubbish or whether that makes it more charming
• I don't really mind that this isn't an amazing piece of work as I did do it just for a little test. Maybe I can produce a more refined one in the future although I did find it very time-consuming