Art & Design: Urban Landscape; Final Evaluation

Art & Design – Urban Landscape
Robert Salisbury

We were given the brief to create a piece to the theme of Urban Landscape that was A3 or larger, in order to do this we were asked to experiment with and develop different techniques. 

After a fair bit of experimenting I decided I was going to use two main mediums for my final piece, the first was going to be painting using acrylics, I came to this by trying different painting techniques and tools and found that I really enjoyed working with acrylics.  The second medium was computer illustration, now I came to this via a drawing route, I really found an interest in the perspective drawing that we were shown, and decided to develop my sketches further by scanning them into the computer and vectorising them, this allowed me to further edit the drawing until I was happy with it. 

So for the first part of my final piece I was going to paint a background, having chosen acrylics I went onto experiment with colours to find the ideal choice. 

This was the first background I created, now although I like the colours used this turned out to be too dark in the top half and didn't really work with the second half of the piece. For this reason I decided to change to a lighter colour.

I kept the darkness to the bottom half of the piece but used a mixture of black and white acrylic to create a nice greytone for the top half, this was then light enough to take forward. 

Having now created the background for my final piece, it was time to take the second half of the work and get it applied. 

For the second half I developed my multiple perspective sketch into the following digital illustration...

I then printed this onto clear acetate in order to overlay it onto my painted background. Now I was limited to the sizing of this as the college printers would only print to A3 at largest on acetate, so my piece would have to be A3 size. 

I then took the acetate print and painted white acrylic onto the back in random light spots in order to give some highlights in randomly chosen areas, I feel this really gave the piece an extra dimension.

Next I overlaid the acetate onto the background and fixed it into place by applying a card boarder. 

My final piece was then completed, I'm really happy with how it came out although I would have liked to have been able to produce it on a larger scale, but due to the printing restrictions this wasn't possible at the time. Moving forward, I would like to develop my painting skills further, and one thing I will definitely be doing again is the perspective drawing.