For my art class, we were assigned to create an ink print based on the prompt of a symbiotic relationship. So far, I have just finished my initial artist prof prints and the next step is to print my design on the a flag material for the final product. Initially I struggled with deciding what I wanted to have as my design but in the end I decided to go with jellyfish. I chose jellyfish because after doing some research I learned that they have a strong symbiotic relationship with each other, small jellyfish being in a group. I learned that even though smaller jellyfish don’t have eyes or brain, they know to stick together in a group for protection. So now knowing that I wanted jellyfish to be the main inspiration behind my design, I need to decide what I wanted them to look like. Below was my first brainstorming page with the jellyfish.
I placed two jellyfish in the middle to pull the viewers attention and then two jellyfish on the top and one jellyfish on the bottom to visually balance the print. I did two rough drafts of the jellyfish design, shown below, but in the end decided to go with the design on the ____. I did this because I felt that the design I chose looks more like jellyfish visually so that I wouldn’t have to explain to the viewer that they were jellyfish. Next I was feeling that the design was a little bare and I wanted to add some texture. In the blank areas surrounding the border around the jellyfish, I did wave like curved lines to symbolize the ocean. Then since the block that I would be carving on for the print had two sides I decided to utilize the second side by showing visually how the jellyfish were connected. I chose to do this by drawing a visual representation of a jellyfish’s souls connected by dotted lines.
Here is the final design:
The black marker and blue marker parts would be the front side of the block and the orange parts would be cut into the back of the block.
After rough draft prints (first cut)
Above are my prints after the first cut. with my jellyfish design, using the advice for my art teacher, I realize that I need more texture so it wasn’t just black and white lines. So I decided to go in and cut in more texture. I added more texture by adding small lines in the inner circle shape of the jellyfish and by adding rainbow like lines into the waves to give them more motion. With the backside of my design I made a huge mistake. I forgot that the image would be flipped when I printed it so that the backside of the design became on useable because the drawings of the jellyfish souls no longer lined up with the real jellyfish. This is useful though because art is also about learning from your mistakes and turning them into something new. So now I’ve decided that they’ll be two different designs printed on two separate flags so that you’ll still get the visual meaning that they are connected just not on the same flag.
Stay tuned for a new blog post coming soon with my final flag prints and my final reflection on this piece! :)
Comments