Developing Murals

Moving past the conceptual stage I have made some digital mock ups of my mural concept.

To create this piece I began by using an ink pad and pressing both mine and others fingers onto the pad, while the ink was still wet on my fingerprints I then pressed onto the page to inprint my fingerprint permanently onto the page, doing this multiple times per ink dip in order to achieve different opactities and textures within the fingerprints. This improved the look of the fingerprints when pressing on towards the next stage of creation.

Following on from creating and pressing the fingerprints, I then scanned the fingerprints in and digitsed them by removing the background from the photos, allowing me to then begin positioning them into the pattern that I desired

After further research I discovered that the official Soviet death count for Chernobyl is not infact 3, but is actually a much higher 31. Although this number is much higher it does not reach anywhere near the international expected death toll and the figure 31 most likely looks better than a single three when placed within the page boundaries.

This piece took only one or two hours to create, the majority of the time was taken up by the conceptual and thinking stage within the piece. The fingerprints were made with two different techniques involved. the “one” figure was created using individually selected fingerprints that were moved across documents, and placed within a stencil type layout until the number figure was formed I then removed some fingerprints so that it did not look too exact. The “Three” figure was made faster and differently. by clumping together fungeprints in a different document, I then duplicated and moved the clump over and over again until i had a large square filled with fingerprints, I then simply erased all of the areas that were not contained within the three figure.

I think that the one figure does look much higher quality, it fits the overall style of the piece much more than the pattern based outcome. However making a pattern was much quicker and so for development pieces I think the pattern effect would work more time effectively. However for final outcomes I think the only option is to make the figures out of individual fingerprints over a pattern.

I think this is by far my strongest outcome of the project so far, the striking appearance works to draw all passer bys attention straight to the piece, however the fact that it is crafted with hundreds of fingerprints gives the work a deep and impactful reveal factor, it confuses viewers enough to lure them in further and learn about why the number is 31 and why it is made of fingerprints. The plain colours match my style perfectly and mirror the aesthetics of my overall visual identity, being choatic, yet strangely organised. given the strength of this outcome I think I would like to take this “Chaotic, yet organised” style much further. Perhaps moving it into my leaflet body copy as well as the content within my posters.