Bubblewrap Printing

Continuing on with the bubblewrap theme, you'd think I was obsessed or something?! But actually it is just an unusual and very versatile material to use! For my next bit of work I used bubblewrap to print with, as I'd done previously, but this time used images from my mythical research. I chose a Pegasus image and a butterfly image. I cut these shapes out of the bubblewrap and took some photos of them focusing on the shadows and silhouettes they created.

I then used the shapes I'd cut out for printing and as stencils and below are some of my favourite outcomes.

At some point in the future I may also do these prints using card instead of bubblewrap in order to achieve sharper outlines. I may also draw some designs and patterns within the bold outlines.

Which is your favourite?

Building a Bubblewrap Bird

This is a piece of work that I'm particularly proud of as I feel like it's very unique and was unsure whether I'd actually succeed in doing it. I wanted to continue with the use of bubblewrap because of its relation to the element of air and thought seeing as I had a massive roll of it I may as well try making a model. I used one of the images I'd found in my research to base the model on to try and make it look more realistic and I was most impressed when my dad actually managed to guess what breed of bird it is!!

Unfortunately, because it's 3D it's quite hard to accurately convey it through photographs, but I've done my best.

See if you can guess what type of bird it is in the comments below?

Fly away fairy

Using an image I'd sketched in the research section I drew a detailed pencil drawing of a fairy.

Fairy pencil drawing

Which I then traced using layout paper to use as a stencil for spray painting. This involved the painstaking job of sitting there cutting out tiny sections of paper with a utility knife that I'd got from my dad as I don't have a craft knife. The stencil was very fragile and delicate, so I only did a couple of sprays. The first was with a combination of black and white paint on a grey-ish background to create silver tones and the second was with black spray paint on a white background.

Stencil

Sprayed stencil on white background

Before removing the stencil

Voilaaa!

Starting development

I began the development section with a mindmap recapping all of the work I'd done so far throughout the research section and some research in to existing murals to give me inspiration on where to start. 

Mindmap

The aspect from the research section that I liked and wanted to explore further was the idea of mythical research so I drafted out a timetable with ideas on how I would development my findings from the research section.

Further mythical research - sketches

Another section from my mythical research that I found inspirational due to its symbolism was Paganism, so I did a separate illustrated mind map of aspects from it.

Mindmap (don't know how to rotate)

I did further mythical research, which comprised of finding tons of visual research from the internet and it was quite hard to find images I was happy with of things such as mermaids and fairies, but I found the site WeHeartIt quite useful, especially for the mermaid images. I put all the images on a word document that I could use for future reference. I selected several images from each of the elements to do sketches of, which are below:

Earth

Air

Fire

Water

Drawings influenced by the Chinese elements

The Chinese elements were ones that particularly stood out to me as I felt they had the most potential for developing into interesting drawings due to all of their symbols that link to the elements. Below is a piece of work I did researching three of the elements further. I chose those three elements as wood and metal (which are the other two) don't overlap with my original four elements of fire, water, air and earth.

Using this information as inspiration I went on to do two illustrations based on the elements of fire and water. Although in reality I did the illustrations before writing out the research work, the ideas and thought processes were still all in my mind.

Completed illustrations

Banksy

This is a post I planned to do around the time I was doing the spray paints of the birds and the cars, but never quite got round to it, so just imagine it was posted then!

Banksy’s street art is probably some of the world’s most well known work, although at the same time no one really knows exactly who he is or much about him at all. His work is generally satirically humorous, but also conveys a message or meaning – often a political or social one. Recurring subjects in his work include rats, apes, policeman, soldiers, children and the elderly. Ever since first seeing Banksy’s work I’ve had an interest in it and the more I research it and the more images I find online of his the more I want to know. A few years back I painted a copy of one of Banksy’s pieces of work and then did my own painting inspired by it, but I have always wanted to explore his work further and to also do some spray painting of my own.

Originally Banksy would do his spray painting free hand but then went on to realise it would be much quicker to use stencils and would lessen his chances of getting caught. The spray painting work I have done is also all with stencils, but this is mainly because for my first time spray painting it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and do it free hand. A lot of his work just uses the colours black and white with the incorporation of just one other brighter colour, such as red, meaning I have used a similar colour palette to him.  I am impressed by the way in which he successfully manages to create such detailed and realistic artwork using just black and white and this is something I have tried to do in my own spray paintings. By focusing on the darker shades in my car drawing and using them to create a stencil, I feel as though I have managed to create a car spray painting in a similar to style to Banksy’s, although obviously not to the same standard. I originally planned to spray paint both areas of black and white and I think this would be a way to improve my spray painting and could be something to explore in the next stages of this project. As well as this I could try and find a way or incorporating a small amount of red into this image to make it more related to Banksy’s work. My stencils were made by cutting sections out of a page from my sketchbook and Banksy’s are most likely done with acetate and cut out by a computer so I think if I had the same resources I would be able to create a sharper spray paint.

One of the prominent themes throughout Banksy’s work is that of the environment and global warming. Coincidentally, my two spray paintings both relate to that: the car in the sense that it is creating the pollution and a large part of the page is taken up by the engine fumes from the car which are air pollution, and the birds because they would be affected by air pollution and global warming and they are part of nature. 

Below I've included some of Banksy's work that I particularly like.

Mythical Research

Throughout the research section I had been doing a small amount of mythical research and created the pieces of work below, which are inspired by the ancient ideas of the elements.

Water

Air

Earth

Fire

These didn't link that well with the rest of my project as I hadn't done much other mythical research so proceeded to do some more. This began with an in depth work document, which I went on to summarise with an illustrated mindmap, that explored the elements and their meanings in a variety of different cultures. 

Mindmap

Wave collage

I went back to do more research work on the element of water and wanted to continue using the materials of ink and bleach on a variety of papers to create a wave inspired collage. I covered textured wallpaper with ink and planned to bleach it too but liked the effect without ink so left it as it was. I experimented using different dilutions of ink in order to achieve different tones of blue.

Wallpaper effect

Wallpaper effect using diluted ink

I covered a page half in concentrated ink and half in diluted ink and then experimented with different dilutions of bleach to see what patterns I could achieve. 

Diluted ink and bleach

Concentrated ink and bleach

Using all these papers cut to different sizes and shapes, I then created a collage of a wave inspired by a research image from my original visual research.

Wave collage - final result

Recycling a failed collage

My surface texture collage was quite unsuccessful due to my choice of materials and the fact that making collages isn't really my strong point in art, but instead of letting it go to waste I used it to do some printing with.

Failed collage

One aspect I did like of it though is the fact that I used mud to paint the leaves at the bottom.

Mud painted leaves

Printing with the whole of the collage wasn't very successful as the background area and the actual leaves didn't really have enough texture to give a good effect when being used for printing, so in the end I just printed with the leaves I'd cut out myself from textured wallpaper and I was happier with the effect these achieved. 

Print 1

Print 2

Giving the grass a haircut and drawing with a twig

I next went on to do some drawings and sketched using the photos I took that were inspired by Andy Goldsworthy, that I mentioned in the previous post. The first one I did was a very finely detailed pencil drawing as I wanted to focus on the details of the whole photo before zooming into sections of it to use for textured sketches.

Detailed pencil drawing

 After doing this pencil drawing I played around with it until I found sections that I liked and thought would be interesting for sketching. The two sections I chose are shown below.

Section 1

Section 2

I wanted to use some unusual and innovative materials for these drawings that also related back to the element of earth. For the zoomed in section of the pine cone I used black ink but drew it on with a twig as opposed to a pen. After doing the drawing in black ink I realised it would benefit from another colour to give it more depth and texture so I also added in orange ink.

I wanted to draw the leaf drawing by getting the colour from the the leaves I'd photographed, but after playing around with them for a while and doing some sort of science-y experiment stuff to try and get the chlorophyll out, I realised that probably wasn't going to work. Instead I used grass to get the green colour, which involved going into the garden with scissors and giving the grass a haircut as well as a lot of rubbing grass across the page. Leaving just the green areas on their own didn’t give the drawing much definition and made it extremely difficult to see any outlines of shapes, so I also added fineliner over the top. I varied the density of the lines from the fineliners to create lighter and darker areas and to define the form of the leaves. By viewing this drawing from a distance its structure is more visible as the lines from the fineliner merge to create areas of tone.

Drawing of section 1 

Drawing of section 2