Persons Of Note: Stamp development

After doing my research on Ali, I decided to create the stamps to represent key moments in his life. I worked mostly in ink just because I felt most comfortable in it and I liked the textures I could create with it. 

I tried to think of as many ways as portraying moments as I could, trying to consider frame and line of sight in each thumbnail.

When I was jotting down the names of the moments, I really liked how the writing came out. This is something I chose to include because I thought it was really nice. It was at this point I wasn't sure whether these might become the postcards rather than stamps. 

I carried on with development playing with patterns and tone and came up with three ideas I really liked (heavy weight champion of the world, Gold olympics and golden gloves) but I was struggling to create the fourth - convert to Islam. After wrestling with what to do, I decided to look into another more specific part of his life. I chose to look at two other well known fights - Rumble in the Jungle and Thrilla in Manila. I chose to do this as the other 3 ideas were all sports based and the conversion to islam stuck out of the set. 

After some development I came up with 4 potential ideas, after choosing to go with Rumble in the Jungle (manila wasn't as nice a shape as Africa was) I created four potential stamps. 

I chose the second one down, just because it had a nice amount of textures to it. 

I scanned and converted all of the stamps into photoshop. For most of them I cut the words I had written next to them (or scanned them in from a seperate piece of paper with my handwriting on) and placed them on seperate layers. This enabled me to move around the words so each one looked similar. Once I had gotten the format (date and 1st class at top, what it represented at the bottom) right I turned my attention to the pattern. The originals didn't have as much etching as the finals, I decided to copy and paste sections of patterns to spread out to the edges of the stamps. 

I finished them by adding a small dotted rectangle around each. If I had more time I think it might have been nice to draw them out again and scan them in (as some of the copied etching is abit obvious) especially the heavyweight champion one. 

Overall I was pleased with these, I think they matched together quite well.