Colin Nyhan
5th May 2025
The majority of these portfolio entries are gleaned from exercises undertaken while taking two OCA (The Open College of the Arts) foundation courses – a drawing foundation completed in 2023 and a painting foundation that I will be finishing in the next couple of months.
I’m using a blog post format here. The post dates reflect when the work in question was completed. The posts are ordered most recent first. The comments, for the most part, are what I wrote at the time.
Ironically, my painting course was an accidental gateway into the world of digital drawing and painting. I picked up an iPad mini and stylus for sketching and couldn’t put the thing down, as you will see from the number of Adobe Fresco creations.
There are quite a few references to use of Microsoft PowerPoint – primarily because I use my work Windows laptop for most things and that is what’s available. I haven’t used the Adobe suite of tools (apart from Fresco) but creative use of PowerPoint’s limited toolset is an interesting challenge in itself. I have used Corel PaintShop Pro and Inkscape in the past. I will be getting a more powerful personal machine soon and plan to have a play with Adobe Illustrator.
All OCA drawing foundation assignments and tutor feedback can be found under the OCA navigation link on the left.
All OCA painting foundation assignments and tutor feedback can be found here:
https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/colinsfoundationpainting
UPDATE – 26th May 2025
I have recently been having a go at photo collage and montage in the service of editorial illustration. Again, using PowerPoint as an imperfect but surprisingly capable tool. Some examples are now included.