Portfolio Squares

Portfolio squares

I want to market myself as an illustrator who has painting skills, and who uses bright colours.  I wanted my portfolio squares to reflect this, and to read as colourful from a distance.

Just putting all my favourite images together didn’t quite work.  After playing about with several versions, I decided to colour co-ordinate my squares, using the background colour as the base.  I also changed the way some of them faced to keep everything either heading inwards or looking out directly at the audience.

I have kept a record of my progress using screen dumps.

I first thought of telling a story (I'd love to do a birthday party - another project), and I liked the idea of splitting an image over two or three squares, as if hey were looking through windows, but even though I like these images, they didn't have the colourful element I wanted.

So I pulled together images I liked, but tried to get diagonals of colour running accross.  I liked the idea of Jessie and Patch in opposite corners.

 I also played around with the idea of perhaps having vertical lines of insects and characters (which I didn't record) but went back to colour.  I liked the idea of having a central blob of red.

I finally settled on the idea of horizontal bands of colour, and after that it was just a case of tweeking the images.

I changed the direction of the fish, flea and rabbit so that they all faced inwards.  Other characters like Jessie and Patch are looking directly at the audience.  And that's it.  Theres a mix of large and small brushstrokes to give texture.  I did mu best to get text in using photoshop, and had to cut down on what I had written.  If this causes problems, Ill do it again in Indesign and re-submit.  I wasn't sure how you needed it for printing.

This has been good for me to do.  Last year at this time I would have really struggled with getting the images on the template, let alone cropping and turning them. This year all I've struggled with is the text box!