Book of Drawings - Content

I have decided to continue to use digital imagery to put in my book, but to try and stick with the far eastern theme.

This is a Photoshop painting of my daughter Chloe. This was based on a picture we took of her sometime ago. It was such a lovely picture I just wanted to do something with it. I used a soft edged brush and kept the colours warm. This might not be typically far eastern in technique or subject matter but it was a good subject matter to display my skills with Photoshop.

A Geisha is an easily recognized figure or Japanese culture. I wanted to create quite a naïve, unfinished image. Again linking to Wabi-Sabi, the beauty in the incomplete. This was done using Photoshop, with a variety of brush types to achieve both soft and sharp edges. 



This is a painting done using Paint Tool Sai. Here I have tried to incorporate a more impressionist image of the Koi, using single strokes of the water brush to manipulate the colours to capture the form of the fish. This is emulating Chinese Brush Painting technique, capturing form rather than detail and exact likeness.

The tiger is one of the most magnificent creatures in the world and I wanted very badly to present even just a portion of that presence in this piece. Again I wanted to go for form and flow rather than exact likeness.

Because most of these pieces are digitally created, this means to get them into the book, I need to print them out and stick them down. While this will get the job done, it seems a little boring, so I am contemplating using another technique called 'Image Transfer'.

 

This was the first image transfer I had done that
was a complete success.
It is the Two Koi on thick card,
with lotus flowers painted on the finished image.

Image Transfer is quite simple but time consuming procedure.

After covering the surface you wish to transfer the image on to with white acrylic paint, you place the laser jet printed picture face down onto the wet paint and smooth down. Once dry, spray the back of this picture with water and, being careful not to rub to hard and remove the paint underneath, the idea is to remove the now soft paper little by little, with gentle circular motions.

Once most of the paper has been removed, a gloss medium can be used, which permeates the marginal amounts of paper to allow the colours to show through the white fluff that's left behind.

The effect is very pleasing but so many things can go wrong. It also has its downsides which unfortunately make it unsuitable to use the way I had hoped in my book.

• It is possible to rub away the picture
• Not all of the paper can be rubbed away without damage to the image
• It can take a number of hours to shave away the layers of paper away
• A more durable surface is required for the transfer to be a success
• The image can appear misty and colours don't seem as vibrant.

Because of these drawbacks I have decided not to use the Image Transfer technique.