Medaling Rubbings

Rubbings

After doing a tutorial with Anne on Thursday 4th February, in  the morning Morning, with Liam, Rebecca, James and Saffron seeing what others in the tutorial had been doing, I found inspiration from one of my peers who done coin rubbings to try rubbings, as I never tried this technique properly, only briefly imprinting leaves back in primary school- which didn't go well, so I thought why not try it with my Nan's grandad's medals and see what happens as I had nothing to lose.

 This honestly was all trial and error die to inspiration from fellow classmate... this is what I ended up creating.

My First Ever Successful Sheet of Rubbings

I used lead HB pencils and a blue biro pen just to see what happened if you look ever so closely they did work but from a distance looks like a messy scribble. 

Sheet Two

With some more attempts of rubbings again some of these came out better than others.

Closeup of Black & Blue Biro Rubbing from sheet two 

Mixture of Pencil and crayon

I wanted to do this sheet specifically to see the comparison in the quality of the shading of the rubbings to see that in actual fact the crayons had a much stronger boldness than the 

HB Pencil.

Black & Blue Biro Rubbing

This one was surprisingly successful I found using both biros to work in my favour with the blue bringing out the main details with the black imprint of a head.

Rubbings of the typography on the medals

An added experiment which was a success, I wanted to capture the typographic details as well as the bold illustrative details of the medals.

Closeup of Pencil Rubbing

One of my successful pencil rubbings as a closeup, you can read the some of the typography and can see a imprint of a head.

 Crayon Rubbings

I developed this idea a little more, I tried using crayons, whilst speaking to my nan, I was doing these rubbings, I was using Lead Pencils and she suggested I try using wax crayons to see if the emphasis on the medals would jump out more and you'd get a stronger imprint so I gave that a go and this was my result, I tried using varied colours- red, green, black and orange.  Admittedly this did work well but some of them came out better than others. Due to the quality of the imprints and the clarity. the reason why I did these is I am hoping to develop these further on photoshop and give them a vintage aesthetic so I could feature these in my publication.  

Here's what I created...

I Started with the Monochrome aesthetic because I wanted to see the difference between using the crayons and the HB Pencils and I felt it would be more exciting to edit on Photoshop when it comes to developing my pieces to that stage.

Greyscale Rubbings

Crayon Rubbing of All the WW1 medals  

Some of these went well... some didn't unfortunately. this is due to too much colourisation and it had over-rubbed and where it had done that it overpowered some of the imprints. 

This is one of my favourable rubbings as they're all 6 medals together and was good to see them all in one rubbing as a piece. it shows togetherness of a mini collection and shows there's a story behind each medal. 

I tried doing rubbings of the entirty of the WW1 medals- the ones in the trio- along with the type saying "South Africa" using HB Pencil and a red crayon lightly rubbed on-top for emphasis on some of the detail on the black.

 

Here is a Closeup of the 3 medals

Rubbings with Pigmented Wax Crayons

My first colour sheet with full colour Crayons

Another sheet of HB Pencil & Colour pencil rubbings

On this sheet the colourful ones were the more successful as the grey ones look overpowered or not legible and therefore the colourful ones make the sheet more successful as they're bold and at the right consistency. 

 Closeup duo colour pencil rubbing

(Sorry it's upside-down- but interesting looking at it in another perspective)

Rubbings with Multiple colours (Wax crayons)

Closeup...

Trial and error

This one was a bit messy and busy wasn't my most successful sheet purely because of how busy it looks on the full sheet but elements of this sheet worked for me which I took a closeup of that below...

Closeup...

Greyscale rubbing with slight shading of yellow crayon

this was a very strong rubbing and found this an exciting experiment, what done it for me was the contrast of black and yellow with the yellow allowing the black to jump out

Successful duotone Rubbing with Red and Black crayon

Colour pencil Rubbing experiments

A little bit of colour blended in

Closeup...

Rubbings of my medals

Closeup of the rubbings from the back of one of the medals I wanted to capture the typography of the medal and thought using the crayons would work best for bringing out the typography on the medals- then you could read it says "The Great War for civilisation 1914-1919"

One of my strongest rubbings, this sheet was successful as you can see the bold shapes

from the medals.

Rubbings with Lead & colour pencil

Rubbing with colour pencils

Duo Colour Pencil Rubbings

With these rubbings I decided to try experimenting with using two colours for one rubbing, relating to colour theory trying to blend complimentary colours together to see how the rubbings would come out, this idea was quite successful l, which surprised me as I didn't expect this to go well at all. 

Happy Accident at its finest!

This is one of my favourite duo colour rubbings as it has the full detail of the medal and captivated it well with two contrasting colours congregated together to make a 

successful rubbing. 

Constructive Feedback from Anne and Peers

Feedback from My tutor about the rubbings