Final Piece

I now looked back again at putting my ink and pen illustrations or 'bacteria' into actual Petri-dishes. My method of doing this was to print out one of my illustrations large onto a sheet of acetate. I then out a circle of it to put into a dish.

I liked this as the transparent acetate the drawing was printed on made it look like it was connected to the dish as they were both transparent. This meant that anything underneath the dish could be seen which made me think about putting the cut out circle on to of a layer of PVA glue with ink splats in it, like I had done in my research of Klari Reis. 

This gave the dish another element and stopped it from looking flat. The PVA dried so it was still transparent. I therefore decided the my final piece should be based upon this method.

I now had to come up with a final design of the illustration I would use. I decided to use one of my previous drawings. This was perhaps my favourite one from the whole project and I had used this in one of my pin illustrations.

 My final piece would be made using Alan Bur Johnston's technique of overlapping circles but the circles would be Petri-dishes. I would cut this image up into circles to fit in the dishes before laying them out into a 3D work. I worked out a rough layout of them on top of the acetate illustration before cutting.




After I had poured PVA glue into each dish, I splatted colours of ink into them according to what part of the illustration would be in that dish.

Once I was happy that each Petri in the artwork roughly represented the colours of the illustration, I cut up the acetate illustration into the circles. In order to achieve the overlapping effect of Alan Bur Johnson, I had to print the design onto two sheets of acetate so there was enough to fill each dish. 

I only had to place the cut out circles of acetate onto the top of the PVA glue in the dish and they stuck. I put them back into a cluster of how it would look like when it was finished. 

I next had to stick the base layer of them down onto the backing sheet of card. I also wanted to add something more to the whole cluster of them and so I cut out shapes of my illustration from the rest of the acetate and placed them around the base layer of dishes. In some places the shapes were in the correct position and fitted between the dishes but I also added shapes to other parts of the piece and they still fitted in because of the similar lines and colours.

I now had to add the next layer. I wanted to raise it higher than the first and so I attached the Petri-dishes to small, clear plastic tubes, 3cm high. I glue gunned the rims of the tubes to the bases of the dishes and also to the backing card. The top layer of just one dish was attached to a 6cm tube and this acted as the peak of the Petri-dish cluster.