Chelsea Coils Illustration: Installation: People and Characters

This project was based around people and characters and the aim was to draw interesting people that we seen around the local area and we even had a banjo player, a guitar player/singer and circus performers come into the college so we could draw them from life. I think that this was a great opportunity and really opened our minds to all types of people that are out there. (Circus Performers)
We all then chose people who we wanted to work in collaboration with and started thinking about what ideas we could come up with to portray the people and characters around Hartlepool in the form of an installation. Me and my group decided that we would focus on the aspect of body modification as we were all interested in tattoo art and modifying the body. The brief states that the work needed for this project was 5 drawings, 5 prints and obviously the installation itself. For my part in the project I decided I wanted to produce 3 A1 prints showing a range of body modifications in both genders. I started off by doing 3 sketchbooks full of drawings of people and the sketches from research on my chosen subject focus. The images I decided to create were 2 male heads and 1 female body. I used my life drawing sketches for reference and I used dry point etching to print the images. Once I had printed the drawings I used water colours to paint just the tattoos. I decided to do this because I wanted to create a contrast between the figure and the modifications. Next I scanned the image into Photoshop and with the help of one of my group members we edited the image contract and colour to make them stand out from the page a lot more. I then saved them in a very high resolution and had them printed A1 size. I was worried that when I blew up the images they would lose detail but I don't think the outcome was too bad and I really like how it looked. I also drew onto the wall under my prints using black ink just to carry the drawings on and also to create a starting point for Alan Vest to contribute with his string to tie everything together.
As this was a collaborative brief I will document the process of my group members. Thomas Serginson created 2 A1 prints of female heads in his own preferred style of bio-mechanical imagery. They were both hand drawn and rendered by Tom and then digitally enhanced and an added background on Photoshop. We all thought that it would work well if we connected with the next groups painting so we spoke to Sophie and her group and continued the hair of one of the females into their sky which I think brought the whole stretch of wall together. Tom also connected the hair of the other female into our other group member, Victoria Woods' drawing which makes it flow perfectly. Vicky used black ink to draw and render two female forms with modifications. And lastly Amber Plant had a great idea of creating frames with black and white drawings inside all created in her preferred style of drawing (traditional tattoo). We placed these on the pole that was right to the side of our work space because we thought it would be different and it would also make our work stand out and would drag you in, which in my opinion it did.
I think our whole group worked well together and the finished installation was quite effective. (Credit to Zade Baleci for the photograph http://zadeillustrated.blogspot.co.uk/)