Week 8 - oh to be an illustrator.

From finding my appifiny pieces I started looking at vintage tattoos from the Victorian and Edwardian era and doing more research for myself such as colour swatches, small design ideas and more rough sketches.

 Left is a section of my reflective journal where I used both recent and vintage tattoo design sheets and, with the help of Adobe Illustrator, created colour charts and swatches of colours used.
I felt this was important to me as I always like to work in colour - weather it's minimal or bold, and I wanted my work to be reflective and representational or the era where I am getting my main inspiration from.

 As well as that, I did further research, both with my dissertation and more visual research by looking at the placement of tattoos traditionally in the Victorian to Edwardian era. Main career choices tended to be, at the time, and this is a very big generalization, but of more lower to working class jobs, entertainment such as working in circus' as freaks and sideshows,as tattooist, grafters and military people. Although the world is no becoming more and more aware of tattoos on the upper class and royalty in Britain, I wanted to represent the working women, the beautiful, different, unique women, who, although we don't know what they did or who exactly they were in most cases, had both beauty and youth on their side. From this I did research on tattooed side shows and circus acts from all over Europe and then looked and illustrations and graphic designs that had these influences from the posters in them to help me obtain ideas on layout for my pieces.