The Brief - The Mushroom Forest Create a UV reactive screen print, taking inspiration from psychedelic artwork, with the theme being directed towards woodland critters. The illustration style must be hand rendered rather than digital lines this fits better with the psychedelic free flowing ethos behind this style of artwork.
I have taken inspiration from many different aspects. But mainly from festival art and stage set ups and various events, these kind of night time raves use lots of UV light and UV reactive paint to create magical environments which throws so many different things at you. I wanted to create a trippy mushroom forest, inspired by the magical festival atmosphere and my love for animals.
I initially drew the illustration out by hand, then in order to get an idea of how the image would look with some colour I scanned in my illustration onto my mac then Live traced the Image in Illustrator and then used the bucket tool to add colour to the design. I tried out many variations to see what worked best. Sampling the drawing with different amounts of colour.
The 5 colour screen prints worked really well eventually. Overall the screen printing took me around 3 days. I did a run of 25, 5 colour prints, 4 black and, 4 gradients. I think this was an ambitious project but has paid off well. I really did not expect it to take as long as it did, but there were many errors along the way which slowed me down. But once I had finally got to grips with everything the process became smoother, and after the first couple of layers were down I had gotten into the swing of things and managed to get them all done by the third day. I am really happy with how they have turned out.
Once I had completed my 5 colour print, I ran through a couple of just black versions of the outline, and also some gradient versions too what different effects I could create. I am happy with the outcome overall. There was allot of hard work and effort put into the process, but the end results say it all. I had fun with this project, I feel I have answered my brief to a high standard creating some psychedelic UV art work that looks great in the day time and under the blacklight, this gives the poster an extra dimension. The colours glow bright and the image comes to life . The pictures doesn’t do it justice.