AGI S2 - Week 6 Research and Style Test

This week, I searched into Traditional Chinese Painting techniques, did some brush/aesthetics test in Photoshop and finallised creature designs.

I didn't know much about traditional Chinese painting in general, but delivering the right 'aesthetics' is crutial to my project. So for this week, I reserached into traditional Chinese ink painting, and studied the notable techniques, unique aesthetics used. The PDF attached serves as a 'lookbook' for experimentation, and lots of examples are collected.

After a general understanding of the practice, I started to think about replication in the digital medium. I sourced several digital water colour artists, made observations off speed-paints and tutorials. So I moved on to some brush test in Photoshop, searching and downloading brush packs to see what kind of results they can deliver. I was playing around with not only the texture and flow of the brushes, but also brush settings/modes to achieve the layering effect. Finally I used a combination of these brushes to sketch out 2 test pages, just playing around with the various styles outlined in my research PDF (stronger colours/light washes, black and white/coloured). At this stage, I've begun to think about overall aesthetics as a whole: What style would work well with the environment? What sort of colours would allow the creatures to stand out? What 'can' I convey about the creatures through colours? 

Downloads:

Download File: traditional-chinese-painting.pdf