As well as improving my drawing skills I aim to improve my digital painting skills. Digital painting is a medium that I have started experimenting with in the past year and I would like to use to produce the artwork for my Final Major Project as I enjoy painting as a method of image making. Painting allows me to capture the interaction of form and light, and digital painting as an alternative to painting with traditional media is becoming increasingly common due to the speed of production and ease of reproduction for print. Digital paintings are easier to make adjustments to and produce a more effortlessly polished finish. In the current Illustration industry, being able to make images digitally is a highly relevant skill and will make me more employable.
The final piece for my Final Major Project will be in the form of an Art Book that sets up the concept of the fictional town of Fauns, the people that inhabit it, and their fight for freedom and the truth about the existence of human populations outside of the walls of their town. The book will consist largely of paintings of the setting and characters I have created, with minimal text to guide the reader through the content. The publication will serve as an introduction to my concept, with the possibility of further publications and media exploring the subject matter. This final piece has been inspired by Dan Luvisi’s Last ManStanding: Killbook of a Bounty Hunter, a book of artwork that lays the groundwork for the upcoming graphic novels in the same fictional universe. My publication will broadly target the same audience, however due to the less gritty and violent nature of my project in comparison to Last Man Standing, I envisage that my project will appeal to a younger audience between the ages of 15-25 and can appeal to both genders equally.
My research project will run parallel to my Final Major Project, using the same subject matter as the starting point. My research is inspired by James Gurney’s books Imaginative Realism, and Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter. The bulk of the project will experiment with the use of colour and light to produce more accurate compositions that communicate more effectively with the viewer. I will experiment through the making of models and maquettes of my subjects and the use of practical lighting and tonal studies. The work produced through this experimentation will be used to support my major project and improve the overall quality of my images.
