National 5 Art and Design

Expressive portfolio — evaluation

Candidate name: Liam Thomson Candidate number: 140570281
Centre number:
Instructions to candidates
You should reflect on and critically evaluate the creative process you followed when
working through your expressive portfolio. In your evaluation give justified personal
opinions on:
the decisions you made when working through your portfolio
the effectiveness of the visual qualities of your portfolio, referring to your theme/stimulus
(10 marks)

This evaluation must be submitted on the first sheet of your expressive portfolio.
Please do not amend the format of this document.
For my expressive unit my theme was Scottish, so the object chosen were items such as a
dead fish, tunnocks teacake, shortbread, and a bottle of irn bru as the main objects, I also
added a bowl for the dead fish to lay in as I think it adds a bit more effect to the piece.
These objects represent what people would call Scottish and that’s why I chose them. The
irn bru bottle as well as the shortbread is what I believe people think of when Scotland
comes to mind, the fish can resemble the fact that there’s a lot of water in Scotland and
the fact that I enjoy fishing, so I chose to add it to my piece. And the fabric behind the
drawing represents Scottish tartan which is a common Scottish fabric often used in kilts.

During the creation of this piece, I used pencil to sketch out my objects and manoeuvred
them through the page to try and find a suiting place for each object. The main piece was
drawn with coloured pencil but was sketched with normal pencil originally, when sketching
I used a ruler to measure out the proportions of the objects and where they should go, I
took photos of the objects together to try get a good perspective on how they’d look until I
found the picture I liked. Once got my photo I re-measured my drawing to fit with the
photo and tried to sketch it as perfectly as possible to the photo, I didn’t grid my drawing
as I didn’t feel I needed to, and that the ruler was much more helpful. I wanted my
drawing to be very colourful so when drawing I used brighter colours for the objects to pop
out more.

For my finishing piece I wanted to have my objects pop out even more to give it some
uniqueness, I really think that the use of coloured pencil was a good idea because I feel I
could really express myself with it and test with various colours. I wanted the blanket in
the back to stand out more, although most of it was black I managed to blend in red,
whites and yellows wherever I found that there was colour amongst the black. Creating the
fabric look to the blanket wherever there was a lot of colours was fun and I feel like I was
able to create a good-looking blanket through the use of my colour. The main items such as
the irn bru bottle and the fish I wanted to have stand out more, this is why I chose that
bottle due to its orange vibrancy which I could have pop out, the dead with I tried to make
much brighter with the use of green, pink and white which went well. Overall, I think my
piece works well and there is no over-use of colour and therefor and even amount of
shadows as well as vibrancy.