Working on Print Designs

I've been brewing ideas for the prints for Rogue I mentioned in a previous post about my current projects. Today, I finally had the time to try out a technique I had been pondering on using, and in my opinion it worked wonders! I'm really pleased with the results.

Bambi & Kitty Kat are my working titles for these two ;P

Here's how they came to be:

I took a large sketch pad with a black cover (which I thought I had protected from cat hair but at which I had miserably failed) and collected all the bones and skulls I have. There's a box of chicken bones I had cleaned up thinking I'd make jewellery from them. So far I've only made spine earrings for myself and the other bones have been sitting in the box. The deer horns are from a Lithuanian seller on eBay. I got a batch of three to use as props when taking photos of jewellery and to use in a Halloween costume a few years ago. The cat skull is actually made of resin, and not a real thing. Nevertheless, the cats apparently disagreed and dropped it from my desk last night, breaking one of its eye sockets, which I had to fix later in Photoshop. 

I arranged the bones, skulls and horns into sort of still lifes and took photos directly above, all the while keeping the cats away with my foot ;P They were pretty interested in the chicken bones!

The last step was to work some magic in Photoshop, and after a few hours the print designs started to take form. The silhouette on the Bambi design is a cutout I did when I was testing how to use shrink plastic in my jewellery. After cutting it out I understood that I can never get such detail in the frail plastic which tends to split when cut into small shapes. I still kept the cutout since it was pretty, and now finally there was a use for it! Since it was cut by hand it has a lovely quality of not being absolutely symmetric, which I think fits the style well. After all, the bones are mismatched and there isn't a deer on earth with symmetric horns. I wanted to keep this irregularity as a part of the designs instead of mirroring parts to keep them matching.

Although the prints are quite ready, I'm still hoping to get some feedback and plan on working on them still. The set should have one more design, which would fit a mini skirt, so it will be of different proportions than these two. I'm very pleased with these ones currently, but I always sleep on things before I finally deem them finished or not. A good night's sleep gives a new perspective on things!