Revision SI #6

The idea behind this work was to create a print with my stomach that had many little crevices and designs almost hidden in it, so that I could then add little designs. I wasn’t originally planning to have them all be animals, I was going to have it be whatever I saw in my brain, but that’s just how it ended up. I wanted to give the feel of a children’s book, with all the creatures who weren’t really connected to each other logically but were all bound by a specific area, like by the red ink. I wanted to show that even though I think about my stomach all the time, there are other things happening in the world that are more important than what I think of my own stomach. I thought that adding a childlike design into my print of my stomach would also show, like my original SI #6, how the joys of childhood overpower the self conscious feeling about one's body.

I started with using acrylic ink spread across my stomach. I figured that this would be less irritating to my skin than printing ink, and would be less transferable to the papers, so it would leave more room for empty space and drawing in the animals. I used colored pencils for the animals because it allowed me to draw over the paint a little bit, but didn’t overpower it, as well as the fact that I could add details with the pencil. 

I poured paint on my hand and just rubbed it on my stomach. As you can see in the photo down below where my hands and belly are covered in red paint. I had already laid out my paper, so I simply laid down on the paper and shifted my wait for a few seconds to get as good of a print as possible then held the paper down as I stood up. I made several prints and liked a couple but ended up using one for the final. I then just stared at the print for a long time and as soon as I started to see an empty space that kind of looked like an animal I would draw it in. I felt kind of similar to watching the clouds and making up the things that they begin to look like when you look at them long enough. I think it really used my imagination, because no empty space was going to look exactly like an animal, so you have to kind of make it work.