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.