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Personal Sketches / Mixed Techniques

Personal Sketches / Mixed Techniques

Anna Paladini
January 7, 2019
2 Comments

These are miscellaneous pieces, warm-up sketches, character studies and technique tests.
I love to do sketches, I find it a very helpful way to warm-up before get to work, explore and test new technique, master the use of my favorite tool or just free your mind and enjoy yourself.



This isn't a proper project. These are a series of sketches, studies and technique tests that I made as a try out, character studies or just for the pleasure of drawing.
I love the human body and the infinite ways it has to communicate through body posture and facial expressions, so when I draw just for the sake to enjoy myself, I always find myself drawing bodies and faces. The human body it's also the subject that I'm most confident drawing because I've always been interested and curious about it, I always looked at bodies with more attention than anything else, so I rarely use visual references for my pieces. This kind of confidence allows me to focus more on the act of drawing and experimenting new techniques than on the subject itself.


For this series I used a bunch of different technique depending on the subject. I like to mix techniques and finding new tools. This forces me to keep my mind open to new ways of finalizing a piece and I found it very helpful when I work on commissions. Sometimes you would be asked to work on a subject that you aren't confident with or you just don't know how to approach, but if you train yourself to be flexible with techiniques you'll always find a way to get your work done and to make your client happy (and make them come back to you).

Getting back to the question, you can find a mixture of basic techniques (like pencil and inking, watercolors or basic digital colouring) and more complex sketches and portraits with a mixture of pencil, ink and digital colouring or full digital painting with a variety of tools in Adobe Photoshop.





Like I said before, this isn't a proper project, it's more about exploring and enjoying the act of drawing just for me. But when it comes to share your sketches with somebody, you'll always find that people do have various tastes about illustration: more or less realistic, more or less complex, with more or less color in it. You'll always find someone that sees something in your work (and usually it's the piece that you care less about).
For me is not a matter of "do you like it or not?", I'm more interested in contextualized feedbacks and understanding why you like or dislike something and why you felt attracted or repulsed by something.
I think we always should look up for honest and more complex comments because yes, we all like compliments but a compliment will never be as good as a constructive dialogue. You may discover something new about you and your work watching it through someone else eyes.

I recently started an Instagram page named @rawfragments where I post personal illustrations that would like to explore (and hopefully unfold) contemporary social issues, so check it out! ?

Anna Paladini

Anna Paladini was born in 1989, in a little village deep in the countryside of Marche (Italy). Due to her true passion about any form of visual art, she starts experimenting with drawing techniques at a very young age and never stopped ever since.
She graduated at the School of Arts of Urbino and specialized in illustration and animated-film making. In order to continue her path through experimentation, she moved to Milan and attended the IED Fashion conveying her passion for comics and cinema through dressmaking.
She now is a freelance and works mostly as illustrator and textile designer for important companies such as Moschino and Bulgari and every now and then she takes part in indie projects as consultant and art director.
She recently started an Instagram page named @rawfragments where she posts personal illustrations that would like to explore (and hopefully unfold) contemporary social issues.

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