COP3 - Tattoo image development & mockups

After I established a style I felt i needed to develop it further and try to think of how the style would work as an actual tattoo. I wanted to get away from designing on a computer so i decided to hand draw the tattoo designs after I printed them out.

These were the images I came up with which I feel could work well as tattoos. Ive tried to retain an organic element within the images to allow them to be more transferable as a tattoo but I've also tried to include geometric themes and shapes to retain the more contemporary side of the design. I also wanted to make each element of the images interchangeable so they could be moved around depending on the position and location of the tattoo when transferred onto skin. I feel keeping the colour and the theme consistent throughout the three images has enabled me to establish a style which I think works as a tattoo. The next step that I needed to do was to mock the images up onto skin to see how they would actually work.

This was a first attempt at mocking up the images, I played around with size and placement and also had to edit the image to make it sit on the skin and look like a realistic tattoo.

These are the final mock up images I created, I wanted to keep the model the same in each picture to bring some consistency throughout the mocked up images. I tried different placements and sizing within the images to see how they could look as a potential tattoo, just looking at the images you could see how this style of tattoo could sit amongst other tattoo styles. Im happy with the way this new style I created turned out, I feel I've shown that they could work as an actual tattoo. The style its self could be changed to cater for any client and I feel that the style coould work alongside other styles and not look too out of place.

As an additional element to the practical work I submitted I decided to draw the images onto transfer paper, the sort you would get in a tattoo shop that would have the design on ready to transfer onto a customers skin so that the artist can use the transferred lines as guides for the tattoo.

I flipped the images so that when you transferred the image it would be the right way round, this is particularly important when working with type. I also made a version where I deconstructed the image so you could change the placement of the elements of the tattoo to fir with different placements and to essentially tailor the tattoo for one specific person

COP - Practicial resubmission background work and development

Speaking to my tutor we decided that the most subtable idea for the practical submission would be to create a new style of tattoo that really bases its design from graphic design and graphic elements. The problem with this is that many imagery could be considered graphic design so I felt the focus should be on typographical elements. Through my essay I found that although there are many different variations of styles of tattoos ranging from old school to more modern geometric styles there hasn't really been any new styles that have a focus on typography, most of the typographical tattoos generally consist of gothic or script style fonts, beyond this there hasn't been much more variation.

These are some quite common examples you might often see with typography based tattoos, as I explained in my essay I felt that this style was usually chosen over anything else because of its more natural and organic appearance. I feel the challenge with designing a typographical based tattoo around a more graphically oriented font is to make it work as an image and not just as a quote or a piece of type.

 
Here are some examples of tattoos that use a sans serif typeface something that I want to use in my own design to really connect the design back to the idea its inspiration and background for the tattoo comes from graphic design to connect the two disciplines together. I feel these examples dont work as well as a script or more gothic typeface might because the letters are too uniform and blocky using lots or ink. I also go back to the point I think that tattoos work best when they are more organic and natural. For my practical submission i also want to try and achieve a tattoo that doesn't just work on its own but that could work along side tattoos of other styles and not look out of place.

The next stage in developing my practical piece was to choose some words to use as the typography aspect of the tattoo design. I thought about using a common phrase you might often see in typography based tattoos like for example 'only god can judge me' but then I thought I needed to choose a quote that someone might want tattooed on them. To reinforce the idea that the tattoo design was designed specifically from graphic influences I decided to look at quotes from designers. I didn't want the quote to be only applicable to graphic design I wanted it to be more general so that you could use it in the form of a tattoo. I searched some famous quotes from graphic designers and came up with a page from 99designs. - Famous design quotes

Some I felt weren't appropriate as they were too specific to graphic design, for example like this quote from Stefan Sagmeister - “You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.” Others though I felt could be applicable to all aspects of life like this quote from Paula Scher - “It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.”

From choosing a quote I decided to start to focus on a style to use to create the images. One of my main influences for trying to create a new style of tattoos was the modern trash polka style I spoke about in my essay. This style of tattoos has probably one of the closest resemblances to graphic design influences, it often uses type in the design coupled with photo realistic images using a simple colour pallet of red and black.

Its clearly a very modern style that appears to have a mix of many different influences. This style was the basis I wanted to follow to try and create something new, I also wanted to look at designers who based a lot of there work around typography to see if I could translate this style into my tattoo design. The designers I looked at for influences were Kate Moross and David Carson.

This is the sort of work I felt could translate into my own tattoo designs particularly with a focus on David Carsons work because I feel this is the most graphically representative and I particularly like the way he uses type by layering and breaking it up.

My first attempt started looking at placement of type and the sort of imagery I could use to work in conjunction with the typography element.

I decided to use a mix of geometric imagery for the tattoo design because I feel this is a modern style that still has potential to expand and grow. I wanted to lay the type out to reflect David Carsons work and show an influence from his work. After I was happy with the way the typography looked on screen I printed it out to hand draw it as its a tattoo after all and I feel a screen based design is completely unbelievable  in terms of a tattoo design. I also feel it gives the image a unique and individual look to it.

I chose a simple colour pallet like what is seen in Trash Polka tattoos to reflect this new style and I also chose to illustrate the face of the designer I used the quote from. I think this is not an integral part of the deign I just feel it shows the relationship between the typography and the imagery to work as a piece together, I also feels it reinforces the link between the graphic design influences that are the root of this tattoo design.

OUGD 602 - Children's pirate book - captain Jake final images

These are some of the images taken from the final print of the children's pirate book. 

I was happy with the way it turned out, the original print was an odd format in terms of size so this final print was scaled to fit to a3 which I felt had much better colour to the images. 

OUGD 602 - Vikta lampshade brief - development

The development for this brief took months of work, at one point I was considering giving up because of the amount of time I spending on just getting the technique right for this brief

These are some of the development lampshades where I was trying to find out the most efficient method of creating the lampshade. I worked out the match behind the origami so I started to make a vector image which i would use to laser cut the paper. I tried laser cutting the paper, just to engrave it so it would be easier to fold. I had to trial this with lots of different paper stocks to find which one would work the best, I wasnt happy with most of the outcomes because the laser would singe the paper making it obvious where the folds were giving them a not very clean look. 

I knew the grid to create the lampshade so I decided to score the paper instead of laser cutting it which got around the singing of the paper. I found out that the stock could be quite thin because the origami gave the paper structure. In the end for my final version of the lampshade I chose a stock that was 120 gsm, the isue with choosing the paper was that it had to come in a large format to make a lamp shade that was big enough. the paper had to be 100cm by 50cm to make a small lampshade so it was hard to source the paper at a reasonable price.  

OUGD 602 - Havana Bar flyer

I was approached to do a flyer for a night in a bar in Headingly. There wasnt any real direction for the brief so I had to come up with something my self. My starting point was to use the name and start looking at old cuban travel posters.

I have a love for vintage poster design, I really like the look of the images weather that be for a vintage cuban poster of a vintage ski poster. The obvious direction for this project was to make something that took inspiration from these original posters but also used some more modern layout designs.