Visual Arts

Artist In Residence Program 2021

On Wednesday 28 July we welcomed our 2021 Artist in Residence, an illustrator working with the Year 3 and Year 4 students over a period of three weeks in their timetabled classes.

Miss Olivia Grbac is a Melbourne-based illustrator who loves to spend her time drawing in her sketchbook and observing the world around her. At 3, she was drawing Pepito from Madeline and rewatching Toy Story many times over, much to her family’s dismay.

Working across digital media and with traditional materials like gouache and watercolour, her illustrations have personality and a story to them, combining her wit and weird characters that aim to make people chuckle. She frequently draws flowers with eyes (and hearts), disproportionate people in bright colours, and injects her love for music in any way possible.

Olivia graduated from RMIT in 2013 with a Bachelor of Animation and Interactive media, spending many nights at her computer creating 2D animations and designing characters for screen. She continues to utilise these skills throughout her practice. 

All four classes participate in the initial workshops with Olivia, armed with the task of preparing backdrops for a picture story book. The story, which captures life at Aitken College from a very playful perspective, was written specifically for this project by our student authors, Kisali P and Alana O. In preparation, a storyboard was presented to the students to help with visualisation and planning.

Running parallel with the AIR program is the Visual Arts extension program (VAE) coordinated by Mrs Di Martino. A select group will be working with the AIR in Adobe Fresco, to create character overlays. Olivia will then collate and manipulate hundreds of illustrations, layering the many individual works into pages to create collaborative scenes. This is a time-consuming yet exciting part of the project.

Students involved will be presented with a printed copy of the final picture story book. The book is going to be RISO printed, a traditional drum print technique that produces beautiful, textural qualities that commercial printers do not.

Riso print example

I look forward to sharing this special project with you further…stay tuned.

Mrs Linda Camilleri

Head of Faculty Visual Arts