Breast Prints and Reflection

After creating a first set of prints to start my journey with body printing this year, I was surprised at how successful I felt I had been with numerous different techniques. Although I had started by attempting something far too complicated, I enjoyed the process and quickly learnt that I needed to simplify the number of things I was trying to achieve in one print. There were many factors that went into creating what I deemed a successful print: clarity of line, texture from my skin in the paint, and a clean shape. The biggest challenge is the drying time of the paint.

I purchased a slow drying gel medium for acrylic paint in the hopes of giving myself more time to apply the paint to my body before printing it onto a page. I have never experimented with adding medium to paint before so I'm still learning the different proportions necessary in order to create the effect that I want, and give me the time that I need to create a clean print of my chest. I am very waste conscious and struggled to justify the amount of medium needed to extend the drying time enough but I am adamant that I need to get over this hurdle because the process of making lots of prints is the only way I will learn and improve.

I'm not sure whether acrylic paint is the best medium to be using and I will be experimenting with body paint and potentially oil paint, however I'm not sure how that will affect my skin as it tends to be quite sensitive, and an oil base would need an organic solvent such as turpentine to remove it which would be harmful to the skin. With body paint I plan to moisten the paper prior to printing my body onto the page. I am hoping that due to the water-soluble nature of body paint this will help me achieve a more vibrant and detailed print. With a new lockdown approaching I will have to find a way of making the paper wet and blotting it in my bedroom, but I am hopeful of the outcome and excited to give it a go.

Another question that plagues my mind is my choice of colour. I can find beauty in all colours, so I struggled to narrow my choice down to a few. These first set of prints were initially inspired by the climate change female protesters who go out topless with messages branded on their chests into the streets to create a statement and attract publicity in order to get their message heard. It's both powerful and vulnerable to protest naked: the statement that it makes in the world where nudity is still seen as a taboo will shock the viewer enough to pay attention to the message because the nudity will attract media coverage; however the need for nude protest alludes to a last option where all other ideas have been exhausted and you're left stripping down to the most raw state a human can be because you don't know what else to do to get things to change. Often this nudity will be censored in the media which is something I am all too familiar with as an artist who focuses mainly on nude work. This makes me wonder whether I want to cover natural skin tone and focus more on bright colours when creating my prints to maybe remove the natural skin tones that are associated with nudity.

For these prints I started with colours that reminded me of the planet. First using blues and greens I enjoyed the peacefulness and calm that those colours brought to the prints. Achieving detail is challenging as I did not know where to add the different colours and whether it would have any impact on the outcome. I applied the paint onto my skin using a sponge to increase the speed at which I could cover the large surface area that I wanted to print. This sponge gave me two options: dragging it along the skin to create a brushstroke, or dabbing it, trying push the paint into every crease in my skin to amplify the texture of it in the print. I quickly learnt that to amplify the shape of the roundness of the breast I needed to shade it according to a light source on my body. By shining a light on my chest, it showed me where the natural shadows would be, and I painted these in a darker colour to add depth to my final print. I am particularly happy with how the nipple is rendered in most of my prints. One of my nipples is pierced which is proving to be a problem to achieve a clearly rendered nipple. However, the mark that it does leave is interesting to me and I feel that if I removed my piercing, I would be removing my personality out of the prints. I briefly experimented with creating a background upon which I would print my chest and I very much liked the outcome. I chose not to focus on doing backgrounds in this session because they would add an extra drying time that I didn’t have when I first started making the prints as I wanted to smash out as many as I could, to get the ball rolling.

I tend to gravitate towards the primary colours; I followed on from the bluey-green with yellows and reds. I attempted a different technique where I painted my entire chest in one solid colour of yellow. The depth in this print was underwhelming to me as I felt a lot of detail was lost because everything was very flat. I pushed this print further by attempting to write a climate change slogan onto my chest in the hopes of adding more intrigue to the print. Writing backwards on your chest is not easy and I will explore multiple techniques such as stencils or stamps to create the sharp lines that I envision. For now my skill is not up to par: it is messy, it is streaky, and it doesn’t portray the power that I wanted from this message.

After my initial failure with the writing I decided to put that idea on hold and focused solely on improving my technique when creating a breast print. The next print was my favourite of the series. It is not perfect, but I achieved accurate shading, a textured surface, and clean print of both my boobs. I will be practising this shading technique to try and recreate it in the future.

I wanted to experiment with multiple different techniques while I was still in this early stage of learning and so I continued by using red paint and applying the paint as if my sponge was a paint brush. I drew the outline of the breast with the sponge and coloured in the nipple to try and achieve a print that looked like a line drawing and the result is somewhat successful but I feel it needs more practice and more experimentation to get better results. I experimented with double printing using slightly different colours slightly different techniques and I like the layered look so I will be continuing this idea.

These prints showed me a completely different vision of my chest because although they kept the detail of the nipple and the roundness of the individual breast, the fact that there was only one removed the initial sex appeal that 2 breasts can possess, and abstracted the shape into its own existence. This abstraction is also a path that I plan on exploring further as the results are very thought-provoking and unique.