Deanna Hewitt Exchange Application Portfolio
In this assignment, I was asked to select a part of my body and draw it each week for ten weeks. My work interrogates the role of hands in story telling by incorporating a hand into the composition of each illustration. My goal was to explore facets of visual storytelling while pushing my grasp of composition. In early development I plotted each drawing within my own narrative which referenced the inspiration of storybooks through princesses and castles. Brainstorming the different ways a hand might be integrated into each composition was a challenge, but this is what I consider to be most successful about this work, and it’s an idea that I look forward to developing in the future.
‘Elements and Compounds’ is a work which references Kina Grannis’ 2014 album ‘Elements’. Kina Grannis is an American musician who has earned her success through sharing her work on YouTube, where she has over 1 million subscribers. Even so, her music has an acoustic feel and often references natural phenomena as a metaphor for personal life experiences, such in her songs ‘Dear River’ and ‘The Fire’. It is the interconnectedness between her natural allusions and her digital platform which is explored in this work.
I recreated the album cover photograph with layered drawings on tracing paper. Each layer was based on an allusion from a song on the album. For example, “I have been wilted since winter, waiting for love like it’s water” became the flowers that form the face when the drawings are layered. These were then scanned and digitally manipulated into iterations before being printed and painted. The blend of traditional and digital mediums references Granis’ own nature-inspired music on her digital platform. By pulling apart and reconstructing the work in traditional and digital mediums I’ve explored Grannis’ public persona, which is equally fractured as it includes only what she chooses to share.
‘Flow’d’ is a deconstruction of Sydney Long’s 1898 oil painting ‘Pan’. It experiments with the traditions of oil painting by combining pigment with excess amounts of medium. This interacts with eucalyptus leaf tea, which, as it dries, creates interesting shapes that echo the dripping eucalyptus trees in Long’s original work. By combining the European tradition of oil painting with the tea of such a typically Australian plant, the work explores the clashing and interconnectedness of these two cultures in Long’s work. Originally I wanted to appropriate the work illustratively by placing Pan in a similar composition but in a modern setting that would show a cultural shift away from nature toward industrialism. After experimentation though, I found the piece worked better as an abstract as it allowed for more nuanced interpretations of the original inspiration rather than of society as a whole.
‘Purl Girl’ is a character I created during a 90 minute class task to design my ultimate superhero. Purl Girl doesn’t have any powers, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a hero. She gives out knitwear to people who are slightly chilly. Quick sketches were used to design the basic idea of her costume before starting a bigger drawing. I’ve accentuated knitting as her main character trait by over sizing the knitwear, while skinny jeans are used to balance the plump shapes. I feel she has the potential to be developed into a light-hearted comic book character.
‘Two Years Worth of People I Never Met’ is the accumulation of two years of life drawings that I have conducted of the general public on trains and in parks. The activity began as a way of practicing drawing amid drawingless-classes, but through this project has become a confrontation between myself and every person who has occupied my time without knowing it over the past two years. The small drawings on a large canvas invite viewers into an intimate search through the faces. In the future I will be expanding the canvas and adding in subsequent drawings so that the work will literally grow over time. It is the prospect of turning this work into a long term project and the investment of time that I feel gives this work its credibility.
As a committee member of the UNSW Art and Design Life Drawing Society, I regularly facilitate and participate in life drawing sessions with professional models. Through these sessions I am able to practice the fundamentals of drawing, while at the same time trying to convey the sense of character and feeling found in each pose. Over time I’ve developed an angular structure to my drawings that I find quite pleasing.
I regularly sketch a variety of characters in my spare time. My career goals include character design and narrative illustration in the fields of animation and children’s literature, so developing these skills is invaluable to my professional development. Additionally, I often browse the visual development art of animated films to help inspire and inform my progress.
I frequently start digital paintings with no plans for the outcome. As I lay shapes and colours onto the canvas, I try to imagine what the image could become, and work intuitively to resolve it. The only guideline I set myself is that the work should have a sense of story.
I try to arrange the composition around the characters. Often I will use lighting to bring out the characters silhouette, arrange features of the environment to lead the eye toward them, or apply more detail to the characters rather than their surroundings. By the end, the viewer should be able to see what is happening without a description.
Local band Foxground asked me to illustrate their album cover. Lions and yaks inspired the creature which the band wanted to feel ‘mystical and ancient’, and I included a long tail as a device to create depth in the composition. It was difficult to create an image which worked as a whole and as two halves when the cover is closed, but I feel that this is a strength of the work. Some of my early ideas involved leaving the tail on the back cover of the album so as to make that side more interesting, but this resulted in odd compositions on the front cover which was much more important. To solve this, I drafted the front cover with strong lighting and a thick atmosphere. My intention was that the thick atmosphere would help define the cast shadows on the creature, while simultaneously reinforcing the mystical feeling of the image. These cast shadows added interest to the back cover without detracting from the front. Similarly, I designed the title font to nest into the image and support the drawing rather than being a distracting stamp of text.
I often develop sketches from my sketch book into more resolved illustrations. This ‘Gloop Fish’ was originally part of a sketch in which I was drawing fish characters to fill the entire page with no overlapping shapes. It was created to fill an awkward space (visible on the far left of the drawing opposite), but I felt that it was one of the most original ideas on the page and so decided to take it further. I used a more 3 dimensional style, and lit the face as though the creature was swimming past a divers torch in the deep ocean.
This was a self directed project in which I wanted to design wrapping paper. I thought tortoises had a rather simple overall structure which could be explored to create a variety of quirky characters. As a product which would need to be printed, I kept the colours in the palette to 5. The darkest blue became the outliner for the tortoises, differentiating them from the flowers, strawberries, and leaves, which add variety to the pattern. The simple colour palette meant that the drawing style had to be simple as well, but I still wanted to have volume in the drawings. This is best achieved in the tortoise with a blue spots on a pink shell, because the raised lump of the shell being more forward combines with the 3 quarter angle to allude to a rounder overall structure.
My passion is for illustration and storytelling. I’ve applied for an international exchange in the hopes that my time overseas will encourage me to expand the horizons of my work. I would like to gain new perspectives on my areas of interest by challenging what I know and exploring what I don’t, so that I can become a more versatile and competent creator. Thank you.