After the creation of our robots, we need to create a habitat for them to exist.

We have been tasked with creating a terrestrial environment, an interior and a background of our choosing

I made a few quick pencil sketches to explore the idea of what I might want my forest to look like. At this point I wanted to create a collage of a biomechanical forest however I realised that this wouldn't meet the brief of a terrestrial environment.

Instead I chose to create a road which had been reclaimed by the forest as this also represented the robots transition between industrial/urban and the freedom it was seeking.

I created an undersketch of my idea on black card. The black card would allow me to not fully saturate the page with shading or color and would provide contrast between the painted subjects and the back ground.

For this design I wanted to use acrylic in an experimental way by being very loose and imprecise. I did this by dabbing the acrylic with a larger, splayed brush; this meant I was less focused on exact forms but rather capturing the rough essence of the subjects.

Once I got started I quite enjoyed the process of creating without overthinking the linework, colours or shading. Instead I was free to loosely illustrate the scene I was imagining.

I would only use this process in future to create a background or a secondary element in a design but I'm glad I explored using acrylic in a new method.

I drew an initial sketch of my interior design using an HB pencil and I was really happy with the result so I wanted to develop the look of the sketch further.

Note: In retrospect, I should have drawn another sketch instead of going over the original as it would have been nice to have both instead of having to refer to a photo.

This design was intended to explore the creepier characteristics of my robot with it crawling down a dimly lit corridor, straight towards the viewer from the dark.

I believed that to keep the illustration creepy, it shouldn't distract the viewer with lots of colors or textures and should instead be ?efficient with delivering the message?

Before I started college I would frequently do designs using biro so for this design I really wanted to stretch myself on my capabilities. 

I remembered that, for whatever reason, the blue ink was much easier to create smooth shading and textures as opposed to black which is quite thick and hard to work with on larger areas.

I'm really happy with how my finished biro design came out. It was fun to use a biro and as this piece took me a few hours, it allowed me to develop my application with achieving smoother gradients and values with biros.

If I was going to create this illustration again I would want to draw it on a 32cm x 18cm frame instead of 48cm x 27. This size adjustment would have allowed me to put more time into the quality of the shading and focusing less on coverage. 

Currently I also find it much easier to shade effectively on smaller areas and I believe the quality of the illustration could have been higher if I had made it smaller.

We were given creative freedom for our last environment which initially I found daunting.

I had an idea to create a biomechanical forest in digital collage as I haven't created any digital artwork as of yet. I chose not to develop this idea because I have created several collages and I thought I could use this creative freedom to try something new which I had wanted to try but not found the time for.

Ink painting is a medium that I had tried extremely briefly during the fine art week at the start of the course and I had been wanting to experiment with again ever since.

I love Edo-period Japanese art, specially the woodblock prints, so this landscape brief seemed like the perfect opportunity to have a quick go at studying and recreating some aspects from art I loved. 

My first idea was that I could recreate a landscape from one of the masters and insert my robot into the background as this would be a fun study and homage to their illustrations.

I realised quickly that this was a fun idea but I simply do not have the skills or the time to create an illustration of this quality. I was certain that I wanted to create a Japanese style landscape painting and I could achieve this by creating an original composition inspired by that of the masters such as Hokusai 

This note shows my quick study of some essential aspects of Japanese landscapes - water and rocks. I knew that these motifs would not only look effective but were also achievable aims for me to create in a short time frame with very limited skill at ink painting.

I created ink washes using a ink and water. I accurately measured my mixtures by using a small syringe with unit measurements. I then tested each one of these mixtures on a scrap of the same quality cartridge paper before application, to ensure that they would apply the way I wanted.

Applying my ink washes was for the most part, very successful. There are a couple areas, such as the top line on the tree, where I hadn't mixed the ink properly so it applied darker than I intended.

I found the inking progress extremely enjoyable and quite forgiving as long as I applied the ink lighter than darker. I would then build up layers and pull the dark into the lighter areas to create gradients.

This stage in the inking process was much more focused on clean brush work rather than gradients as the water, cherry blossoms and sun was block colors.

I found the water challenging as the dark blue had a tendency to bleed. I realised that because the dark ink had more ink than water, it would take longer for it to fully dry.

I created several red shades but ended up being the most happy with the red swill water from cleaning my brush as it gave me a delicate pink color which worked really nicely for the cherry blossoms. 

I thought the color would work effectively for the sun, however, I had an application issue as I didn't realise how quickly the layers would dry due to it being mostly water. This meant I struggled to paint he sun as one consistent layer so instead I opted to keep the texture in. In future, I would like to develop my skills so that I can apply smooth block colors even with more delicate inks such as the pink. 

To finish my drawing, I took a 0.5 fine liner and went over my pencil line border. 

I also quite liked the rough edges on my paper so I chose to keep them on and I'm going to look at how I can create these controlled tears on paper in future.