Continued Components Preparation for Sting

Small Chess Pieces

I selected the best linocut prints I had of the chess pieces, I wanted something that had printed well and kept a solid shape with crisp edges.  I then used a Wacom tablet to create the lines which would be turned to string. It took a few attempts before I was happy with the flow of the lines. I am not great at using a Wacom tablet and some of the lines came out quite agitated and angular which I didn't want, although I did like the slight variation in weight of line due to the pressure on the pen nib, it make the image look less flat as a whole. I used the textures from my mono prints to make the lines look more like string and played around with the opacity until I achieved something I was happy with. 

King

The process for the king piece was very similar to the one above, except I used the wave to add thorns to these lines to make them look more like vines. I also made these vines darker than the ones wrapped around the small chess pieces so that they could be distinguished as one being closer and one being further away. 

Border

I already had the design of my border done, I just needed to sort out the colour. I tried out a few different colours and decided that the dark reddish-pink was the best one to choose - it reflects the dark nature of what is happening in the sting, it fits in with the colours of my prints and it doesn't look immediately dangerous or intimidating at a first glance, especially when partnered with flowers. I added the same texture to this that I had used on my prints so they work in sync. 

Text

I really wanted to use hand drawn type for this, especially as Christie's iconic signature that appears on a lot of her book covers is very flowing. I tried to do this with a Wacom tablet but it just wasn't working for me. I really tried to persevere with it but and I have included the best outcomes on page 7 but none of them met the expectations I had of myself. I decided to take a different approach. Using existing typefaces, I selected the areas of the letters and used the tablet to scribble in the fill of it to give it a different twist. In the Trajan Pro experiment I think the first A, the G and the T are the best outcome. They fill the space and leave a texture to be seen. I took these techniques and made similar textures in Brush Script MT. I inverted this so it worked on a black background. I like how the texture shows and it makes it less uniformed overall. 

Like I mentioned previously, I am feeling the pressure with this now. I would have liked to spend more time on the vines and string in particular. Showing the detail of the twists in the string would have been beneficial but I didn't want to get really caught up in small details when I know I have a lot of other work to be doing too. Its time to prioritise.