After feeling like finding items to create pieces from online quite difficult, without being able to have the physical object, I decided to look at things around me that I had bought from charity shops. I have a set of 3 red hexagonal trinket boxes that have a oriental gold bamboo pattern on the top of them. I was really inspired by the style of the boxes and thought a Chinese dragon would go really nicely with this piece.

The boxes started to symbolise to me the lockdown and I came up with the idea of making the dragon seem contained by the box which was how I had really started to feel at this time. For the layout I really wanted to emphasise on the contained and almost clausterphoic element I was feeling, so I took the bamboo pattern from the top of the boxes and translated this to create a border for the main illustration. I wanted to add some hand drawn text to this piece, and this created the perfect ‘lid’ for the border. For the colours, I started by hand drawing/painting using gold and  maroon red and this is the colour of the boxes and seen in the photo below. Once I had finished drawing by hand I was pleased with my work, and almost didn’t feel the need to work on it any further.

It wasn’t until I started working on a separate piece with colourful dragons, that I decided to experiment with this poster further in photoshop.

The inspiration for experimenting (a customisation piece);

Experiments;

I also started to experiment different background but wasn’t really happy with how any go those turned out so, I got the idea to add a scan of a Chinese newspaper into this piece because I felt like this piece really needed another element to it, and when looking for inspiration I found some scanning of old newspapers and was just obsessed with the layout of them. They were layed out in a grid that made a perfect border.

Experimental Gifs;

I decided in really liked this piece and again wanted to push it and create some really cool gifs using photomosh, these are all experimental showing my favourite colour-ways that I count decide between.

I’m really happy that I decided to change the colours of this piece and honestly just change up the whole style, I think this is much more exciting and more my style than it was before. I’m really happy with how this piece turned out.