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[bradleyknoxfmp2o]

On Wednesday I attended an Applicant Day at De Montfort University. Apart of the Applicant Day was a taster session for the course you were doing. Most of the creative students were studying something graphics related so I had to do a graphics related task which wasn't any help for me at all but regardless a fun activity and a chance to learn the names and faces of people that could be on your course or in the same building.

We had search a bin of scrap paper and find things that we liked and disliked and cut them out and stick them on this Venn Diagram template. Because of how random the images in the bin were it was hard to find things that you actually had an opinion on whether you liked or didn't like them so I included some doodles to fill out the space a bit and make it a bit more visually interesting instead of random images glued onto a sheet of paper.

A machine called a Riso Printer, which is based on an older piece of technology called a Digital Duplicator but its been developed and improved to create a Riso Printer. Essentially what it does is overlays two designs on the top of each other, this is something that can easily be achieved in programmes like Photoshop but this printer does it for you. So I created the collage and then a separate piece of paper with the 'For and Against' design was also put into the printer, the colour settings were changed to make the final product have a green and pink colour scheme.

Unfortunately. mine didn't turn out so well and the colours used wiped a lot clarity from the images and the doodles I put on them.

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Stamp Trials

In China we offered the opportunity to purchase a custom made stamp with both our English name and what the Chinese version would be, the handle was also the animal of the year the person was born in so 2006 is a dog so my stamp's handle is a dog. It also came with some red ink in a really nice box with an accompanying booklet on personality traits for the different animals. I noticed on the majority of the paintings I saw there was a little red signature stamp so I bought this custom made stamp to do the same thing. Including little details like that will hopefully make the artwork more unique and even more so that its custom made and not some one I found on the internet, its uniquely mine.

When it came to testing out the stamp it didn't come out amazing and the shape was very broken but when added with a good amount of water it turns out looking just fine. So it's tricky to get right but its worth it as its a small but impactful detail to include. I will put some tape over the English name and just have the Chinese version because I think an English word in a painting that's inspired by Chinese art is a bit silly.

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Inking Using a Chinese Brush

When looking around the Shanghai M50 Creative Space I purchased a paintbrush from an art shop, there was lots of expensive options but I bought the cheapest one I could find. Using an authentic Chinese brush as a tool for my artwork is something that no one else would be able to do and could get me a couple more marks as even the tools I'm using are on theme. The brush is surprisingly nice to use despite its price. It didn't take me ages to learn how to control the brush but I still need to get better but the outcome is really good and the ink looks really nice on the page and then if there's gaps I fill it in using a normal outliner pen.

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I was nervous to start illustrating Zhenkai City in the background as I'm not too familiar with illustrating environments but drawing buildings and collecting photos of them and the skylines there involved in while in China has defiantly improved my skills and improved my knowledge on how a skyline should look. I started with sketching in some rectangles of different heights and shapes to get a rough idea of how it would look, I then lightly erased these guidelines and started to make the buildings different shapes and some three dimension to some of them. I wanted to create some buildings in shapes you wouldn't normally see to show the futurism of it but that will be bale to be portrayed a lot better with how I design the buildings which I have only just started to do, I think that's where the artwork may lack a bit but I'll try my best. The colours I choose will also play into how futuristic the city looks. I've taken influence from Shanghai's skyline more than the others as that was the most advanced city that we visited and therefore the closest to what I'm trying to achieve, It was also the city that I was able to view the skyline properly so I have a lot of photos of the city from both day and night that I can use for references.

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I started the sketch for my final piece starting with the foreground and working backwards until the city skyline. The cliffs in the foreground feature a withering tree and the other one will have a derelict temple but right now I'm struggling to get the shape and design right. The colour palette of this area will be dull and muted which will contrast to the bright colours of the city in the background, as this is an illustration I'm not able to convey the story of the world I have created in a conventional manner. The dull colours compared to the bright ones will show that the traditional temples and former spiritual presence of this land is no longer respected and has been forgotten while the many colours that will create the bustling futuristic city to show what has replaced the old.

Drawing the rocks was fun and I think they turned out well, It's not exactly realistic but I wanted to include some sort of weird style of my own as a lot of the paintings I saw in the museums of China had some out of the ordinary designs. To start off with the rocks were very distracting but I simply erased some lines to create some gaps in between the rocks and it made it a lot less distracting. I then drew some rocks in between the two main cliffs to fill space and to give the cliffs some sort of place of origin and not just randomly coming into the page, to make it look like there's a bigger mountain terrain that we can't see.

The tree I had taken inspiration from a painting I saw in China, I took influence from the twisted shape, I originally wanted to have leaves on the tree as the way I saw it done in the Chinese paintings was simple but effective and when involved in the whole artwork looked really seamless but I think from a story stand point it makes sense for the tree to be dead. Again, I'm proud of the way the tree has turned out ad the whole piece is looking really promising.

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I randomly came up with a couple characters for my fictional world. I looked at Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. I was just doing trials but I decided to go in Photoshop and make it look like a ancient scroll just so it looked like some form of outcome and could tie into the project instead of just being a worksheet. I saw this as an easy way to have some sort of world building, to have some form of established language and then I will feature these characters on the buildings of my final art work.

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Another one of my favourite is this illustration of one of the women who was dressed up at the Forbidden City. Again, it was good practice with my brush pen and the dress had lots of intricate patterns which i tried to convey but that would require me drawing very detail patterns of flowers so I just did random shapes to get the idea of a pattern on the clothing across which I think worked, but I wasn't too focused on whether the patterns were accurate but more on brush control and having a mix of both thick and thin lines in this piece.

The vest and dress also had patterns on them which had a shine to them ,you can't see it well on the image, but I used my pencil and just pencilled in some areas to represent the shine of the clothing.

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When we visited the zoo in Beijing we were all tasked with drawing a Panda. Seeing an actual Panda was defiantly cool but they are smaller than I thought they'd be but maybe that because these ones are being kept in captivity, and they weren't doing a whole lot. I'm really pleased with this drawing and instead of outlining the whole thing I just decided to use a brush pen to block out key features like the face and eyes and add some shadows to places like behind the legs. It's a simplistic drawing but was good practice with brush pens and inking which is going to be heavily used in my final outcome so most of my illustrations I try to go for the same style or different styles of inking. Drawing in public was very weird though especially as tourists, we got lots of looks and people coming up to view out drawings which I didn't mind but just something I hadn't experienced before, they seemed more interested in me and the others than the actual animals at the zoo. This continued to happen throughout the whole trip made it allowed me to talk to some Chinese people who spoke English and that meant for a nice conversation about our lives and telling our different stories.

A bit further on to the trip when we visited Mentougou Village when we ate at the restaurant everyone presented their Panda drawings and we had the locals decide on a winner, second and third place. I came second and I was bought some Ultra-Man trading cards as a reward which was really nice and the cards are super cool.

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My project is based in the fictional city of Zhenkai, where the traditional and spiritual has been abandoned by the new and modern. This illustration pretty much sums that up. Two old Asian style buildings left to rot and crumble while a thriving city stands tall in the background. What helped was that this drawing wasn't entirely made up. When at Dongyue Temple I managed to find an area where I got the buildings of the temple along with the CITIC Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Beijing, in the background. I of course exaggerated the skyline in my drawing but being able to have a rough reference in front of my eyes was extremely useful.

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I did this drawing at the Humble Administrator Garden. It's the different shapes of the stones that make up the floor. I simply didn't know what to put in my sketchbook so I drew the floor but it was a beneficial exercise I think as I had to follow the shape of the stone and the space in between that and the next stone and the showing the cracks and texture of them. I had planned to fill the whole page but didn't have time, it's still not bad and it kind of looks like a pinecone.

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This illustration of one of the statues from Dongyue Temple is my favourite. It of course could be better but for a quick sketch which is what all my drawings in this sketchbook are its really good. I only used a normal biro pen and I followed the image really well. My project involves creatures like this so it was good to get some practice drawing Chinese monsters. The shading isn't bad for just using a biro and weird facial expression and the wrinkles it causes are presented well. I'm very pleased with it as it is only something quick.

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The rocks in some of the gardens had very peculiar shapes and I couldn't quite tell which ones were sculpted or if they just looked like that. This one in the Lion Forrest Garden caught my attention as it resembled a face, this one is most likely deliberate but some of the rocks I couldn't be so sure.

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Illustrating some Chinese character was also something I ended up doing as I plan to create some of my own fictional characters just to flesh out the world a bit. Although I didn't have a calligraphy brush I still tried to replicate the style of one with my pens, I achieved that pretty well and they defiantly appear to be have done with the stroke of a brush, but now that I have purchased one I will do trials and see how they turn out with an actual brush.

I also did multiple rubbings with a graphite pencil of different characters on walls and transferred them onto the paper, I didn't gain much from this but it was a fun thing to do to fill up my sketch book a bit and have some diversity in there and not all just illustrations.