Idea Development: Hand Signs to Hand Shapes!

As part of my research I decided to look at sign language as way of communicating messages, for my earlier research I had taken photographs of a friend performing the alphabet in Makaton, a simplified version of BSL (British Sign Language). I've been really interested in this idea because I think it has a lot of possibilities,  I wanted to create a new visual language based on Makaton, this way it was addressing both sides of the messages theme, the communication and the interpretation. To start developing the hand signs into brand new shapes I layered some basic Photoshop shapes on top of the photos, in order to see where the anchor points of the shapes where and to help understand the structure better. This has helped me because I now know the basic outlay of the sign, so I can re-work that into a shape whilst the image still keeps it's original intentions. 

The original photograph

The photo with anchor points