Assignment 9: Beyond Paper

For this assignment, I need to create using a different approach to illustration by producing either a tattoo, an illustrated object, or a piece of street art.

Before I do that, I want to understand the open brief title of 'You are here.'; the initial thoughts of the brief is the obvious idea of choosing a location and creating something around the location to indicate that you are in that area. But I started to think a bit more and started exploring ideas of where we are in the bigger schemes of things, we are a tiny blue planet in the vast depth of the universe.

There's also through the spiritual sense of things, when you're in a flow of doing something you enjoy. From experience, when my anxiety picks up, I remind myself that I am here, that I'm okay. Which would be a nice concept to share with the world.

Idea

After days of figuring out which I wanted to do, I ended up with tattoo design. I was debating with the ceramic side, however I was looking back on my old work from Level 1 and wanted to prove that I could create a good tattoo design.

https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/absyillustration/category/coursework/part-4/exercise-a-tattoo/

Old Tattoo design from Exercise: A Tattoo (Illustration 1).

Mind map

Seeing how much depth I wrote for the mindfulness/connection part of the min-map, I decided to dedicate this project to those aspects.

Mood Board

I was trying to pick photos that evoked the sense of connection and fragility, I ended up picking nature and humans as one-- I did choose some statue elements through I figured there would be a lot of texture that could make the tattoo design feel busy and unreadable.

A5 Idea Generating

When generating ideas, I had to think of placement and composition on how the tattoo would fit on the body and flow with the dimensions of the body. The wider tattoo images where thought up for a upper back tattoo, but the composition was asymmetrical and busy, I wanted it to be simple but powerful. I liked the idea of fragile bugs wings and the unusual patterns that they have, and it seemed like a nice way to help structure the tattoo without the hands just falling into nothing-ness.

I also played with a marble chest statue and and hand resting on the chest but it also lacked structure and balance, the hand idea seemed to stick with me throughout since personally I feel they portray connection. I tried the marble statue hands but realised that it could come off as a cut-off hand (which was also mention in the feedback from a family member).

I drew some lines and "ink spills" that could create a focus between the hands, just for something to play around with as I go along. Going back to it and observing digitally, I did another A5 page and tried to expand the hand theme more, by including BSL (British Sign Language) to reference 'Here' to closely fit the brief title-- however, the metaphorical side of the designs seem to resonate more with people that I asked.

Plan

I started out with getting a reference for an arm as the placement for the tattoo, this way I can make sure that the tattoo would flow naturally down the arm as if this was a real tattoo being made. I initially started with the design below and as I started to get into the creating stage, doing textures and shading I found that the black circle behind the hands would make the hands unreadable.

I ended up finding some really interesting brushes for Procreate that helped me achieve the authentic tattoo look.

Process

Throughout this process I played around with different elements that could create and more interesting design, again, looking at the ink-spills and some natural elements of smoke, etc. However it made the tattoo way too busy and feedback given to me suggested that the design with the hands and bug wings were much nicer.

Final work

Evaluation

The brief of this assignment was "You are Here" and I took the open brief down a direction to the more spiritual and mental health side of things, whenever I or someone I love (whether it's friends or family) get anxious, feel stress and anxiety or feel depressed-- I find that something as simple as physical contact very grounding for the other person, at least to my personal experience; which divulged into overall connectivity of humans to one another.

The project is something I wanted to do because I recently got another tattoo and was able to pick up things that my tattoo artist said about tattoo designs, and I also watched Ink Master where I was able to look at how they combat designs and briefs.

When listening to my tattoo artist, she spoke a lot about placements, how the tattoo bends and stretches along with the muscles of the body. As well as some unspoken rules on tattoos that could be broken if done well (which she did). I've got a long way off to achieve her level of tattooing but it was really great insight to tattooing.

I believe that the overall design is an improvement on my tattoo design from the first year, and I do think it's a pretty tattoo-- when I asked fellow people from the art community and they said it was beautiful.

I like the hands and the bug wings coming off of it, and the textures and shading look really nice! However, I do think it's a bit lackluster. I tried to keep an open mind when approaching this brief with the intention to be extremely creative but I just think that it's just something that everyone else can come up and a bit unoriginal.

I didn't get much constructive feedback, just positive reviews so I'll have to wait and see what other students and tutors say about what needs to be improved.

Reflection

What conversation has gone on between the work and the place?

There was a lot of focus and thoughts on how the illustration would be composed on the body, and I also wanted to be able to recreate the needle work and shading of tattoo was is used predominantly in black and grey style of tattoo which I have the most love for.

What did this opportunity offer you, and how can you take what you’ve learned back into your paper-based work?

I was able to improve on work that I did several years back by taking my previous research tasks and fully taking every consideration in, as well as observing and noting mentally my experiences with being tattooed and watching tattooing to approach a much clearer and more successfully tattoo design. Even though the design was simple and not what I thought I could achieve, it's enabled me to pick apart my mood board and narrow down what works best for a design.