Sunga Park

Watercolour Artist

Sunga Park was born in Busan, South Korea.

She is a self taught Korean artist, using watercolour in a unique way to depict landscapes in rural and urban places. Her paintings are inspired by her travels, visiting new locations with quite detailed architecture. Park works with the properties of water and creates these dreamy like expressions of cities, each having their own unique perspective.

Materials she uses are watercolour and pen to create more detailed outlines to further push the intricate detailing in buildings. Because the water colour is on the looser side, the pen balances out the messiness by adding structure.

Sunga Park's artwork focuses on capturing the detailing in architecture, by using watercolour she makes us imagine the rest of the piece - leaving certain elements blank and unfinished. Her work has this mysterious feel with a dream like appearance of the water resembling smoke or clouds.

This piece captures an old church building with its intricate structure, but presented in a dream like view - as if its floating in the sky with the clouds hovering around the building. Reminding me of the movie 'Castle in the sky'.

Her illustration/linework is left incomplete - having certain parts of the building be cut off or left exposed. But she then fills these gaps with colour which completes the whole view.

Her understanding and use of watercolour allows her to produce unique results; where its as if we are looking at clouds to smoke. The colours are a big part of her pieces, making the colours bleed from the building and letting it blend to the other colours and shadows. She mixes both warm and cold colours together which complements well. I love the messiness the watercolour creates, having the colours blend and bleed together to create a mystic type feel. A sense that we are in a fantasy world.

With this piece, we can also see the texture of the paper, rather than using normal paper or card, she uses this type of thick textured paper which further adds to the artwork.

My intentions for this artist is to combine both photography and contemporary art to create this mixed view of architecture. Park's work is all contemporary and traditional, but I will be using photography to capture old architecture with watercolour. By printing and then overlaying paint on top of the image to reproduce a similar result.

PROCESS - 1.BRIDGE :

Increased the blacks and white
Slightly more shadows with less highlights.

2. PHOTOSHOP :

Open a new canvas - A4 size
Drag the photograph onto the page
Removed the Background
Eraser tool at 50% Opacity and 0% Hardness
Slowly erased certain parts of the image - leaving some parts slightly exposed

I tried to visualise where the watercolour would go and would leave some parts with a lower opacity so that the water colour can blend more seamlessly with the building.

3. PRINT + WATERCOLOR :

With the type of paper, rather than using normal printer paper or cartridge paper - I used my own watercolour paper which could hold large amounts of water. I cut down the paper to size (A4)

Printing the image on normal card resulted in the paint not sticking to the image at all - It would roll of the paper because of how smooth it was.

Print the images on the A4 watercolour paper.
Using Watercolour paint and a large brush, I slowly built up colour.
Using water to drag the paint and create this faded look.

Colours used - Black, indigo, brown and orange. I would also mix these colours together to create different shades.

4. SCANNING + PHOTOSHOP :

Scan all the images to a digital jpeg file.

Because the scan would make the colours more faint I opened each image on Photoshop to slightly darken the colours adding more contrast and saturation.