PRIMARY TOOLS & MATERIALS:
PAINT, SPECIALTY PAPER

Additional Tools & Materials: Adobe Photoshop, camera, scanner, light table, brush pen, inkjet printer, paint spatula

Today's mashup: paint plus specialty paper. Tattoo paper. I started in my sketchbook drawing many different styles of uppercase A with a thick Faber Castell brush pen before zeroing in on one I thought would make a nice tat. I scanned my work, picked the winning letter and created a sheet with 24 repeats of the letter in gray. Then I placed a clean sheet on top of my composite sheet and placed them both on my light table. Then I played with different treatments using acrylic paint - everything from layering to decoration to inlining and gradients. My favorite one was this red A with the suggestion of marquee lights as pink dots inline. 

Again, I created a sheet of duplicates, but this time, printed them in reverse on temporary tattoo paper. I followed the package directions by printing onto the shiny cardstock, then applying a sticky adhesive sheet to the back and rubbing over each design with a smooth paint spatula. Then I cut one out, removed the adhesive, placed it on my arm under a moist cloth, and boom - temporary tattoo. 

This study was fun because it bounced from hand to digital to hand to digital, and then literally to my hand. I enjoyed the variations that came from my studies in paint - I could play with the shape of the letter, the weight, the gesture, all while keeping the same basic letterform intact. Once the design reached my wrist, there's a huge degree of flexibility in the letterform. Twisting my wrist back and forth could easily turn this semi-italic script upright or extremely italic. There's also the inherent temporary tattoo wrinkling that can easily be seen in the first and last photo - it takes the wrinkles already there and multiplies them. I think a whole typeface based on temp tattoos would be fun if somehow it incorporated that side to side flexibility that comes with a design being placed onto the skin.