Visual Narratives : Final Piece Image Making and Editing

I decided on a concertina book for my final piece - the width of this format would lend itself to a panoramic woodland view. I was unsure about how to go about making the images as I wanted to do one long image. The options I had was to paint it all out on one big piece of paper, or do it on separate pages - perhaps A4 sized. In the end I went with using two pieces of A2 to paint my images on (as this was the largest watercolour paper the library offered).

The images I made had to be double the size of the final book so that detail could be added and the images shrunk later on. I enjoyed being able to add the detail but I think I may have got too caught up in it at times and had to remind myself that everything would be half the size!

In my development I used gouache and it was my favourite result so I decided to use this for my final images, as it offered a range of colours - being mixable and I could achieve great flat colours which would help to give a stylised look to my images. Although it worked really well for my pieces I found it a little frustrating trying to mix the same colours over and over, as I couldn't really mix a large quantity at once. I also struggled a little on getting the right consistency, which left areas patchy (I went over them again) but the more I use gouache the better I'm getting to grips with it.

Since my images were so long scanning was difficult as the scanner I used closed over the side rather than over the top. I should have used the print dungeon's A2 scanner to avoid this but I was too impatient and wanted to have my files ready!

Piecing most of the scans together in photoshop was fairly easy - most of them lined up without much editing. The bandstand however was really off because I had painted it over two separate pages and obviously not drawn them properly lined up - it would have been a better plan to draw this piece as one page.

Using Molly's advice I managed to just about fix it by lining up the top of the bandstand - erasing some of the barrier and rebuilding it by copying and pasting other areas of the image, and using the heal tool to blend the areas together. I am happy that I was able to fix it up but I definitely think the image could have been better to begin with (and drawn as one image).