Evaluation Report

Before meeting with Sam and his team at Livity, I felt slightly anxious- I had never done a ‘Live’ brief before and was worried that I might not be able to produce a ground breaking idea to meet their standards. However, on our first meeting with Sam, I felt at ease as they made our whole group feel relaxed and welcomed.
As I had had no previous knowledge of what type of work Livity or Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT) did, I decided to research both parties. I was impressed with youthfulness of Livity- it was set up by young people and run by young people. This gave me the impression that they were the perfect marketing company to be working with TCT, as their own team members would be able to identify with their target audience.
The idea behind TCT immediately struck me as a worthy cause. Providing teenagers with their own wards in cancer units seemed both logical and necessary, as they would otherwise be put with infants or the elderly- neither of which are age groups particularly comparative to teenagers. Not to sound clichéd, but it made me feel good to know that the reason behind the work we were spending so long producing was a worthy and significant one.

From my initial ideas of a floral, mehndi-esque designs and sequenced statements, I feel as if I have produced a fitting and relevant outcome to the brief. With the main idea of promoting the website www.rubitin.com in mind, as well as the information Sam gave us about TCT, I produced the four required statements fairly fast. They are ‘Rub it in…’, ‘Rub it into her legs…’, ‘Rub it into his chest…’ and ‘rubitinuk.com’. The two middle statements played on the fast facts Sam had given us- men are more prone to getting cancer on their chest and women on their legs.
I purposely created a sequence of statements that were deliberately unfinished as I wanted the audience to go and find out more for themselves, hence the last statement being just the web address. This way I would be able to achieve the brief of getting people to sign up the website in a simple manner and without preaching.

When I presented my four statements to the Livity team, they were impressed with the intricacy of detail and they way I had produced a sequence. However, it became an issue when ‘placement’ was mentioned, as it seemed problematic produce this as an advertisement. My initial idea of placement for my statements was in a magazine publication, putting the statements in consecutive pages, so that it ran in the sequence intended.
However, though this wasn’t a bad idea it wasn’t gripping either. Sam then noticed the reference to mehndi (he had noticed it before but was worried about stereotyping!) and suggested I take the idea back to its roots, actually applying mehndi on people with the ‘Rub it in’ website hidden among the intricate patterns.
Here are some pictures of mehndi patterns I have applied with the website included:


I was pleased with the results of these pictures and the effect of the henna tattoos when placed on the body. These were only primary tests and I will soon do proper designs and photograph them in a more professional manner.

The outcome of my four prints did not come to life as well as I had hoped. Unfortunately on two of my prints, the acid etched more away than intended, leaving the print looking blurred and slightly ineligible. The text input on my prints also didn’t flow that well in a sequence as they were all slightly different sizes. I had planned to rectify this mistake but found the process to be too long in such a short period of time. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the same size text, I will be doing a Photoshop version of these prints.

This module has been, by far, the best we’ve done all year in Design. I feel as if we were not wasting our time in the production of these prints and, it has in fact renewed our inspiration for the course we have chosen. We have for the first time been able to interact and work with one another as a group, sitting around one table and discussing our ideas and how we would produce them.

Tattooed Up!

Here are some photos of Amy and Laura and I posing with the henna tattoos I did containing the www.rubitinuk.com website:

Henna Kinda Inspiration

Once we had our induction in the print room, looking at all the various techniques involved, I decided to do an experiment with etching. This interested me as I had previously done screen printing as part of my A Level assessment and was curious to try a new technique.

Above is my first etching plate. Experienced etchers (?) will be able to notice my first mistake with this plate. Yep, the writing is the right way round when it should be back to front! But thats what experiments are for. The design I did on this plate was inspired by henna designs and floral pattrns used in mehendi patterns. This was useful as I do these designs in my spare time and enjoy practising patterns on my friends and family. Above are some examples of henna art.

Funnily enough, drawing inspiration from henna wasn't my first intention- on my example plate I was merely providing a fitting border for the 'Rub it in' font I hand wrote in the middle. However, the way I drew these designs signifies to me how deeply embedded henna is in my system- like I subconsciously revert to what i know best. Spoooky!?

Research

In order to support my idea, I thoroughly research all areas Amanda and I had discussed. She had said that my prints reminded her of silent film credits, with decorative borders and elaborate text. She also said the it looked slightly like the illustrations of an old fashioned fairytale book.
With this in mind, I began looking at children’s literature illustration. I came across a fairly respectable illustrator called Arthur Rackman, whose work is quite linear and has the effect of an etching print.

Development

These are the processes i went to to produce the final plates.

I researched fonts on the website www.dafont.com- Brilliant for text based projects!

I found tracing paper to be useful tool when doing an etching plate, as it allowed me to reverse images without any hassle and removed any chances of mistakes ocurring.

Completed Prints

Here are my four completed prints, using etching.

2nd Livity Meeting

After meeting with Sam and his team at Livity HQ, I was really encouraged to take my project further. Once he and his team had looked at my work, they were really pleased with the outcome. Sam said that my designs reminded him of Mehndi (score!) adn suggested that I started thinking about placement. My response was that it would suit a publication (eg magazine) as the statements followed in a sequence. However, Sam thought it'd look better if I actually went out in festivals and offered to do henna designs on people that had the 'rub it in' slogan hidden among the design. this was when i decided to research henna design further.