Arts Award Gold Qualification Specification:
My Art Form: Digital Art using Photoshop
My New Skill: Figure Drawing
______
My name is Prince, and I am a student at Treasure House School.
My favorite art is japanese manga art, as it just speaks words out of drawings. You can tell what they are doing, even if you can’t understand japanese.
It means life and death. You may experience it once, or experience it forever.
My digital art
Here are some examples of my digital art work from my Media Studies GCSE:
When did you make these images? I made these last year.
What are they? They are climate change prevention pictures.
Where were they taken? At the back of my school playground
Who are they of? That’s me. I did the poses. And then I edited them to add a climate change message.
Why did you take the pictures? It was a lesson for a media session where I had to follow a brief.
How did you edit them? Using photoshop. I did not know how to use photoshop at the time but this project helped me to learn it. I’m really experienced now.
My Strengths and Weaknesses
| Strength | What I have done in the past to show this strength |
| Using a range of different materials | In my DT work I used a full set of tools to work on a box, I almost created a speaker. |
| Making social observations about real life | I talk to my classmates on the regular basis and we talk about current affairs. |
| Measuring and cutting | In DT, we measured our boxes, and then used type of saw to cut it and amend it back into a box. |
| Collaborating with others | On a daily basis, I work with other students and members of staff to do things. |
| Being inspired by other artists | I went to the Japan centre and I was amazed by how much was there. It inspired me to make my own manga character. |
| Weaknesses | Why I would like to develop this skill |
| Expressing emotion and feeling in my artwork | I would like to develop this skill to improve my emotions and make my art work better |
| Art that looks like real life (realism) | To expand my range of skills and abilities |
| Rough construction drawings and sketches | To improve my technical skills and my art in general. |
| Telling a story with my artwork | To make the people who look at my artwork understand on what means so I can convey a message and give my drawing an actual meaning. |
My Interests and ideas
My project
I plan to design my own manga character. I would like to learn figure drawing and then apply those skills so that I can create a manga character using digital art by drawing on the computer and on paper. I will also need to develop my Photoshop and digital skills to do this. I will learn about anime artists and art in general and I will particularly be inspired by Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.
To collect research I will:
- I will research other artists like Hiro Hiko Araki
- I will visit places like the Japan Centre
- I will look for anime and manga images to use as inspiration
- I will find out who can help me with figure drawing and photography
To plan, practise, and prepare for my project I will:
- I will work with a practitioner to learn figure drawing
- I will research and gather equipment like pens and graphics tablets
- I will work with a photographer to help my improve my digital skills
- I will practice physical and digital drawing
To create my project I will:
- I will make several rough sketches and pick the best ones
- I will draw the outlines of my character in marker and on the computer
- I will use digital and physical colouring skills
- I will use Photoshop to edit and enhance the character
To evaluate the success of my project I will:
- I will share my final drawing in an exhibition and in the art magazine I am making for my leadership project.
- I will write and conduct a survey for people to fill in so I can judge the success of the project
- I will ask the practitioners that I worked with for feedback
- I will evaluate the work myself comparing it to the work of my favourite artists.
How my project will use my strengths
| Strength | How can I use this strength in the project? |
| Using a range of different materials | I will stencils, pen and paper but I could also use the computer and a drawing tablet |
| Making social observations about real life | I will do this to develop the personality of my character |
| Measuring and cutting | This might not be relevant in this project but I might need to be precise in my drawings |
| Collaborating with others | I will work with professional artists to improve my skills |
| Being inspired by other artists | I will look at other manga artists and be inspired |
How my project will develop me achieve my goals
| Weaknesses | How will the new project help me with this? |
| Expressing emotion and feeling in my artwork | I will work on facial expressions in my drawing classes |
| Art that looks like real life (realism) | I would like to work on realism in drawing clothes and hair. |
| Rough construction drawings and sketches | This will be part of learning to draw |
| Telling a story with my artwork | I want the character to have a backstory that I can express in the artwork. |
Evidence of Progress
Learning Projects
Working with a practitioner: Melanie Jones, Photographer
About Melanie
I did a photography project with Melanie Jones, I took photos of my friend Cael so that I could learn about using the studio lights, the camera, and Photoshop. This would help me with my drawing project so I could learn to correct my artwork in Photoshop. It would also help me to learn about posing a character.
About the project
This is the brief given to me by Melanie that shows the skills she taught me and when I could do them independently. I planned the pictures and learnt about lighting, before taking some pictures of my friend. The next week, I did Photoshop to try fix some errors/try to make it better. This is still a work in progress, but I’m almost ready to reveal my artwork.
Learning how to use the studio equipment and camera
The studio equipment was really difficult yet it was eventually understandable.
Here I am setting up the studio equipment.
I took these pictures of Aidan using 3-pointe lighting. I think they look pretty good.
What did you learn about by doing the drawings above?
I learned how to position the lights and how to create different moods with different lighting. I learnt how to represent the camera and the lights in a lighting diagram.
Planning my mini-photography project
Above is the lighting diagram for my Cael shoot. I chose one-point lighting because it looked moody but also because I wanted it to look like a silhouette.
Taking the images
Taking the pictures was fun. Cael was didn’t want to do it but I convinced him, I let him take some photos of me too.
Editing the images
I edited the pictures in Photoshop, I wanted to use these as reference images for my drawing so it was important to get a good contrast in the images.
The final images from this mini project
Feedback from Melanie
These images are excellent. You did well at creating the sort of poses that might be used in a manga strip and I think these will be valuable when you start to create your illustrations. Your Photoshop work is good and I can see that you are developing your confidence with the software. I particularly like how the filters you have added bring out the hard lines of the poses as this will help you when you use them as reference images.
Melanie Jones
How this project helped me to achieve my goals
| Expressing emotion and feeling in my artwork: The poses are hopefully emotive. It was hard to get Cael to open up but it helped to make jokes so that he was more relaxed |
| Art that looks like real life (realism): The original photos are realistic but adding the filters helped to create a hybrid of images. |
| Rough construction drawings and sketches: These poses will help me to create my construction drawings. |
| Telling a story with my artwork: These poses will be part of a story. |
Preparing for the new work
Online Course: Character Art School with Scott Harris
Melanie is a photographer and digital editor but I also wanted to learn figure drawing as my new skill and she has less experience with this so I did this course on Udemy:
I can confirm that Prince completed 15 hours of this course under my supervision and the supervision of DT teacher Barney Locke in his Arts Award Lessons.
Melanie Jones
Some photos of my favourite lessons:
I took all of these lessons:
The best lessons were on dynamism in the form, how to draw hair and clothes, and putting the forms of the body together. this was a course where you had to draw along with with the lessons. Here are some of my drawings from the course:
Prince spent a lot of time working through this course and produced a huge amount of sketches, many more than he has shown here. While Prince is just beginning with figure drawing, it is clear that he understands the lessons given and I am pleased to see him being free in his drawing, taking risks and experimenting. My advice to Prince would be to slow down a little and to not press so hard with his pencil.
Feedback from Melanie
Creating The New Work
Bringing it all together: The time has come to combine my new knowledge of figure drawing with my digital and photoshop skills!
The graphics tablet – I had to learn how to use the graphics tablet which was hard at first but soon I got it. Here are some of my first experiments:
These have a sketch layer and a line art layer.
I used my reference photos to create this sketch using the skills I learnt on the course:
Then I scanned this sketch into the computer to use it as the basis for my digital drawing.
Here I am using a graphics tablet to draw over my sketch and create my character:
The Final Line Art:
Adding Colour:
Adding Shade:
Adding text to create the character profile:
Extra: Learning about perspective by drawing a background scene for my character. This is a two-point perspective. (unfortunately, I didn’t have time to include this behind my character but I am still glad I learnt about perspective)
Overcoming Challenges
I had some confidence issues with this project, here is some feedback from Melanie about this:
During the project Prince lost confidence in his work. He has had a very bad experience at his old school with art where a teacher embarrassed him in front of the class and he experienced bullying. These are some of the reasons that he has come to Treasure House, an alternative provision for students who have struggled in mainstream education. Although he wanted to improve his drawing, confidence was an issue and I did not want to push him in ways that might be triggering for him. About halfway through the project Prince decided that he didn’t want to do arts award any more and began avoiding school on the days we had our lessons. However, we showed his art to some of our teachers and then, gently, to some of his peers. They were all very supportive and said that could see how much he was improving. This gave Prince the confidence to come back to school. And once he started using digital software, and started to see the project coming together, he was able to turn things around. I am very proud of how he pulled himself together and was able to complete the project.
Melanie Jones
Click here to see my Final Piece!
Feedback
Under my final piece (click the link above). You can see the comments that people made on the work. I shared the final page with my school by email.
My Evaluation of this project
| I made an evil character using photoshop, I used character designs to draw the stances and I made it work. I coloured the character in, made it look more menacing and evil, tried and make a little room for him to stand in, covered in red to show his personality, an evil lunatic. I learnt a lot of things with Barney on my online Udemy course. I learned how to draw hair, I learned how bendy legs and arms should be, and I also learned how to draw faces and body parts of the face. Going to Forbidden Planet helped me with this project because I had some ideas seeing the manga, and some of the facial expressions there, I saw a lot of angry, evil faces and decided that would be my character’s image. An evil maniac who has no mercy for nobody. I ran into a lot of problems, I had a lack of confidence due to my drawing, i couldn’t draw for my life! It was really hard, plus I made a lot of excuses to not come to school that time, it was really difficult, but I pulled through. Other people thought it was really good, though, in my opinion, it could use more depth, more vision. But everyone thought my drawing was really good. I would change a lot of things, the depth of the character, the eyes looked a bit crooked in my opinion, plus the stance I would change, but due to time constraints, we had to choose quickly. I would also change the face a bit. Also, I would change the backstory, because I tried too hard to make it dark, yet I made it look like a backstory for a mary sue made by a 8-year-old made on wattpad. I would take it a lot more seriously next time we do this. I really wanted it to look better rather than the things you see on Deviant Art. I wanna get in touch with proper artists that could help me improve my drawing. I want to better myself as an “artist” The best part about this project was for me to improve as an “artist” to better and challenge myself in drawing. It was excellent this project, and I wish to do a lot more drawing in the future. |
How I met my goals
| Expressing emotion and feeling in my artwork: The facial expression and colours helped to convey emotion in my design and the backstory had emotional elements too. |
| Art that looks like real life (realism): I was drawing in a manga style but I worked a lot on realistic clothing. |
| Rough construction drawings and sketches: On my Udemy course I learnt to make construction drawings, you can see quite a lot of these above. |
| Telling a story with my artwork: I told a story in my character profile. |