Butterfly Flutter By

This wasn't quite the order I did things in, but let's just pretend it was...

After I'd done some printing and stencil work with the butterfly shapes my tutor suggested it might be a good idea to add in some detailed drawings and patterns within the shapes of the butterflies. Not wanting, to get behind on my work and not knowing if I'd get the extension I'd applied for I decided to do some other timetabled work and then go back to this if I had time at the end.

I drew the first designs with sharpie marker pens and then added in a chalk outline to make the shape more obvious.

On the second page of designs, I used three different techniques. I had planned to do a detailed pencil drawing but the print was on the wrong paper for this, so the pencil didn't blend too well and I couldn't get it to a really dark tone as it was on pink sugar paper. I went over the pencil in black sharpie pen and ended up creating a silver colour, which was a pleasant surprise. In the second butterfly I drew a detailed design using a combination of black fineliner pen and black sharpie pen and in the last butterfly, I drew in some patterns with black marker pen and then added in some colour with sharpie pens.

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