Ann Marie Perez

  Valeriane Leblond is a French artist who is based in the UK. Her work features really sensitive pallets with the occasional bright earthy one therefore I feel like she is an  appropriate artist to research. I also really like how she creates these images which include elements of sub stories and narratives within them. For example the images below is of a house in the countryside however there is a narrative also existing in the bottom as we can see an woman with a cat putting washing on the line. Adding small narratives to illustrations of nature could work well within educational children's books as the message would be subtle which would be more appropriate for younger audiences so that the book doesn't feel too heavy when dealing with sensitive topics surrounding  environmentalism.

Below are a few quick experiments I made whilst practicing my photoshop skills. I am now starting to feel more confident with photoshop and am enjoying the process of digitalising aspects of my traditional work.  

 I used the book Werner's nomenclature of colours by P.Syme as part of my research into colour. The book shows a variety of shades from Darwin's Voyage on the HMS beagle. I felt this was appropriate for my project as I am looking at natural imagery for my authorship project and I frequently use earth tones within my work.

 Below are some plans from my sketchbook for a bigger collage piece which will compile lots of the location sketches of mushrooms from block 1 that I made to demonstrate how mushrooms grow in abundance on the forest floor and on trees and logs etc. I also want to provide a snap shot of the vast variety of mushroom species that can be found in one park and compile them all into one area which is of course and exaggeration.

 Today I attended a session with Maisy where we would go over my photoshop skills. During this session I went over all of the side bar tools as well as learning how to utilise masking layers and gradient maps. I used a combination of these skills to create this image where I placed the houses I made into the collage to make a digital version of the piece. Overall I like the sense of depth I was able to achieve in a was that was quicker to traditional collage. I didn't like however the roof of the building at the hop starts to blend into the soil as they are a similar shade of brown. To rectify this, I might try dropping a different colour into the background to act as sky to make the building stand out more.

Below are some more experiments with collage from my sketchbook, I particularly like these three examples as I feel like they are becoming more refined. Fieldfare: Jug filled with a bouquet of flowers: Simple brown mushroom pattern design.  

 I also played around with adding worms to distort the scale even further, I really like how playful some of these images feel.