OUGD 501 - Context of practice - essay practical

For the practical side of my essay I decided to go down a relatively obvious route in terms of style. What first drew me to my subject matter, Russian prison tattoos was that style of tattoos. I feel it only a natural progression that I would attempt to recreate the style. The Russian criminal tattoo style does seem to have its roots in old school tattoos, but they seem entirely unique from what you generally see. Finding a subject matter was something that I struggled to come up with at first because through researching my subject I came to learn that there aren't any tattoos without any hidden meaning every aspect of a criminal tattoo will be there for a reason.
I particularly liked the portraits that I saw in a lot of the drawings of the tattoos. I felt the style was quite similar to how I draw so I didnt have any problem trying to recreate the style.

 These are just examples of the drawings I took inspiration from when it came to making my own. Because the portraits appealed to me the most, they tended to be about the leaders of the time like Stalin or Lenin, often accompanied with an anti Communist slogan or something relating to the state.
I thought I would take this one step further and focus on portraits of people in power in Russia, focusing on the formation of Russia and the Bolshevik party as I felt this was a time in Russia's criminal history where things started to rapidly change.
I did some research into the originally elected Bolshevik party members. I came up with a couple names and went from Vladimir Lenin who was the original co-creator of the party.
I didn't want to copy the criminally influenced connotations with the slogans because my versions of the tattoos had no significant or deeper meaning they were just purely aesthetic, which is something I spoke about in my essay.

There were quite a few prominent figures at the time so its was just choosing the one to focus on. I had an idea that I wanted to create a large scale drawing that would be laid out in the style of the sleeve, so that all the illustrations link up.

The chains and barbed wire i used to link all the pictures together hold significant meaning in Russian criminal tattoos depending on how or where they are used. I also used a similar technique of drawing that wouldn't have been too far from how they tattooed in the prisons. originally the tools would have been just a basic needle to create a line by manually pressing into the skin. I have created shading on the portraits by using a stippling technique that really adds depth and life the the illustration. Portraits of the time would have had similar shading due to the fact the artist would have had to manually stipple as apposed to an electronic tattoo gun.

OUGD504 - design for print - development

I drew up a mind map to determine the content for my pages that outlines briefly the print process's main information, I decided on using cost, colour, stock and also the benefits of using that certain process, I think this is an important category because it might not be immediately clear why someone would want to use screen printing over a digital print for example. 

Here I have drawn up some initial thumbnail sketches for me to determine what the best content for my posters should be.

These contain the content I want to include on my booklet that will accompany my posters in the print pack.

This is a sheet I drew up to help me determine the layout and net of the booklet I want to create, I didn't do too much development on this mainly down to the fact I feel this is the best way for me to put together a booklet in this instance. I first got the idea from the Gf  Smith paper talk we had a few weeks back. I wanted a simple construction for the booklet because my info pack is already quite simple and minimalist in a sense. I also wanted pages o be removed from the booklet so they could be taken out and seen next to the poster without having to take the whole book with you, the idea behind the pack is that its a visual aid to help with printing and deciding which print techniques to use in a certain circumstance. The way this book works is that its made out of one sheet of paper folder in a clever way so that it will contain 6 removable pages. I have also designed it with cost in mind, I have chosen a specific size so that I can make the book out of standard size paper cutting the cost on trying to sorce a certain size and colour stock.

This is my lino cut letter that I based on the style of an american artist who's name I cannot remember right now, the image above is a piece I did based on the same guy for a clothing company which I based the lino cut on. I decided in this initial development to print the letter on the lino the wrong way round so I could experiment printing on different stock, like for example tracing paper so that you would view the image through the tracing paper.

This is a first attemt at creating the book, I did this just so i could see that I would work as a document.

All the images above are taken from a book comprised of different hand drawn typography artists by Michael Perry, the books called hand job and I think its really helped my in the process of determining which letter forms to use in my posters. I've based a lot of my initial and final ideas on adaptations of type in this book.

These are just some of my initial content ideas for the print posters

Thumbnails taken from my sketch book to help me determine which letterforms to use on each posters, inspiration for each letter comes from a different place or artist. 

For the final ideas for the posters I created a few for the same letters so I could mix and match between them as seeing the posters in a line was important for the overall end result of the project. I wanted some to be more hand drawn/ hand rendered and others to be more clinical and digital looking depending on the process used. Although each letter form different in style and process I wanted a common theme to run through out which was the fact they were all hand drawn and produced.

This is a finished foiled letter form, each letter although printed is still undergoing development, with this one I think ill take it a step further maybe by filling some more of the page in the gold foil, I have also thought about using another colour foil to see how far I could take that as an experiment.