Skills, techniques and processes I decided I wanted to try out spray paint and stencils because it is a very manipulable medium to work with. I got three different pieces of thick paper, one for the basic fish outline, another for the outline of designs I am going to put on the fish to express that not everything is absolute. The first thing I did was to Put my base image into photoshop, and threshold the image to get the basic shapes of the fish to be outlines. I next projected it and draw a basic outline. I then grabbed a stiletto knife and cut out the lines I had drawn.
Base image Outline stencil
Picture taken by myself in the streets of Hiroshima
I then spray painted the first stencil onto the second piece of paper in order to make the designs on the the fish. Then I used a stiletto knife to cut out the edges.
spray painted base
Example of the drawings, markings made on the fish I then did some experimentation on scrap pieces of paper, I aligned the fish outline and the markings. It is essential that they are different stencils so I can make the markings different colors. I noticed I had to be careful about the spray paint splashing out of bounds, in order for it to do exactly what I want it to do.
After making the two first stencils, I decided I needed to have a stencil that was just the fish outline with nothing on the inside, in order to have a base color for the fish If I was going to make a background and I want to have the fish be a separate Identity, so that is what I did. I also ended up with a cut out of a fish, which I experimented with as well. This technique I did’t like as much because it gave the illusion that the fish was glowing. Glowing can indicate that it illuminates the way, or that it is something special in comparison to the rest of the picture. The later is the reason why I decided against using the cutouts.
Harmony in Chaos duo Page 10 I then experimented using the filling for the fish, as well as the outline on top of a background using s t e n c i l s o f fl o r a l designs from a generic pack of stencils from the art store. I really liked the floral designs but when I placed the stencils on the paper and spayed them, the paint would be on the borders of the stencil as well, which gives everything a boxy feeling. To combat this, I put scrap paper around the stencil so the paint would go in it instead of the background. I then applied the s a m e b a c k g ro u n d with better technique on the background of my work. The colors I used where blue and two greens, a light and a dark. I filled the fish with gold and then the outline with black and the markings with silver.
Gold Harmony in Chaos
I then followed the same process with the next fish, which is named Silver Harmony and Chaos, as the color scheme of the fish and background are swapped.
Silver Harmony in Chaos