octopus | Jess Claxton

After I had transferred my sketch of my logo to Illustrator, I had to choose a colour scheme as well as how I wanted to colour it, for example just the lines or fill the whole thing.

I started by using my rough colours that I had chosen for my colour palette, but not finalised yet, to use as the lines.

I thought that this looked alright but I wasn’t entirely happy with it as I felt that it looked a little boring. The first colour I had chosen looked too dark on the lines, and almost looked black and the final colour I felt was a bit too light. I also had another colour after that one but that was far too light.

I wanted a watercolour background, similar to that of the watercolour tattoo I had previously seen but in my colour palette. I found this really difficult to do in Photoshop, despite downloading watercolour brushes. I wasn’t happy with how any of the colour was going onto the page or how it looked. I also tried finding a watercolour background that I could put straight onto it although I was still not happy with how this turned out.

I had put a font at the bottom although I hadn’t picked a final font yet. I liked that the octopus was filled in as I felt that it stood out more but I wasn’t sure what I could do with it.

I asked for some feedback from my housemates and one suggested filling in each section of the octopus with a different colour from my colour palette.

(again, I hadn’t chosen a font yet or a position)

I liked this a lot more and I felt that it stood out quite well. The only issue that I had was that I wasn’t entirely convinced that it could be used as a logo for a tattoo studio.

Another suggestion from my housemate was to change the colour of the lines to white so that the octopus was just made up of the coloured panels.

I like this as well, although I feel that it looks a lot lighter.

After disliking the other ideas that I had made I became stuck for ideas. I began searching tattoo logos on different sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest to get a few ideas. I came across a graphic design company called ‘Zef Studio‘ who had produced a nautical themed logo on their Tumblr page.

I thought that designing something similar would be interesting for my own tattoo logo as I liked the circular shape and the way that it had the words inside a border. I also liked the simplicity of the illustration inside.

Again, I became stuck for ideas as I felt that I was copying the design above when I tried to come up with my own and it wasn’t original enough. Although I did still like the idea of having a fairly simplistic logo (which goes against what I originally decided, as I wanted a logo that could be traditional tattoo). The logo for the actual design company caught my attention as I liked how minimalistic it was but also had a sort of ‘hipster’ vibe. I had previously had an idea to create a logo made up of triangles as I wanted it to fit into the hipster vibe of Shoreditch. At the moment, triangles are often seen as being fairly hipstery and so I wanted to try and use this within my logo designs.

I had also previously seen a watercolour tattoo of two birds that appeared to look as though they were origami and so were tattooed on in triangles. I really liked this idea and thought that it would work well for my logo.

I thought that it might be interesting to use a sea creature of some kind for my logo rather than an object to represent my nautical theme. I originally looked at using a sea turtle, although I felt that it wouldn’t look good for a tattoo studio as it is not something often associated with tattooing and/or nautical themes. Instead I chose to use an octopus. I found an image of an octopus outline online and sketched it out.

I then overlaid this with another piece of paper and covered the whole shape in triangles. The edges were not perfect as in the original they were rounded, which could not happen with triangle, but I liked the structured look of it. Below is my sketch.

This is my rough sketch of how I wanted my logo to look.

Jess Claxton

Tag Archives: octopus

Colouring the octopus

Octopus Idea