Oval Roughs for Prints 2

 These are the final two designs for my prints. I think the five are working well as a set now. There are some alterations I want to make, mainly adding more flowers and detail to make the enlarged image appear more full. I don't want there to be empty gaps because this will ruin the consistent density of the images. I might change this knight image so that the two horse heads are from different teams, one white and one black - I think this will have more meaning and show difference and tension between them. I also want to make the size of the chessboard squares smaller so they are more clearly recognisable as a checkerboard pattern. I also think the vine border is considerably thinner than the borders of my other images so I might make a few vines twine together to bulk this up. 

Revenge (knight)

Unimportant but Interesting (pawn) 

I dont like how the clues from the stories are floating around in the background here. I might add in some vines to connect the separate images and make them look like they are being held in place. An alternative would be to make them look like they are falling, maybe I could do this by placing them alongside falling petals and leaves to give the image some movement. I will have to see how the design looks when it is enlarged. 

The next step is to draw these designs out at the actual size my prints will be so I can have a clear idea of what is possible. I need to be careful not to go into too much detail because this will need to be cut out with a lino cutter which isn't very precise. However, I can go in to more detail with my digital layer of colour. 

I am also going to research some linocut and woodcut artists to get into the frame of mind of making imagery like this. This might also give me some pointers of how to tackle common problems with these processes. 

These are some drawings I did very early on in the project. I think these have influenced my final roughs a lot; I didn't go back through my sketchbook and decide that I wanted them to be similar to this but it just seems to have happened. I think this is a result of becoming really engrossed in my topic and the images and research are now engrained in my brain and I find myself incorporating elements of this into my work subconsciously.