Papermaking Final: Believe it or Not

For my papermaking final, I wanted to something biographical, so I decided to base it on my tattoos. I wanted to turn it into a play on a Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibit. With this idea in mind, I came up with the concept of doing pairs of hands mounted like butterflies. I started with my own palm tattoos, then decided to add other designs from pictures of palm tattoos I found on the internet. I also chose to do two chest pieces: one based on my own chest piece and one based on a very simple chest tattoo I found on the internet. I made the hands out of lightly dyed yellow cotton pulp by using hand-shaped deckles made from tracings of my hand. The chest pieces were torn down from larger sheets of the same hand-made cotton paper. I used various colored threads to stitch the line work into the sheets. I then painted the sheets to give them a darker flesh tone and slashes of color where appropriate.