Jan Švankmajer born 4 September 1934) is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others. He has made 27 films in total.
Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses fast-motion sequences when people walk or interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects being brought to life through stop-motion. Many of his films also include clay objects in stop-motion, otherwise known as claymation. Food is a favourite subject and medium. Švankmajer also uses pixilation in many of his films, including Food (1992) and Conspirators of Pleasure (1996).
Stop-motion features in most of his work, though recently his feature films have included much more live action sequences than animation.
Many of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child's perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were suppressed. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s. Writing in The New York Times, Andrew Johnston praised Svankmajer's artistry, stating "while his films are rife with cultural and scientific allusions, his unusual imagery possesses an accessibility that feels anchored in the shared language of the subconscious, making his films equally rewarding to the culturally hyperliterate and to those who simply enjoy visual stimulation."
The surrealist movement was inspired by Sigmund Freuds theory of dreams. Surrealist artists generally aim to pursue the marvellous and to create a sense of wonder and almost fantasy in a way for the audience.
This is Jan Svankmajers short film Dimensions Of Dialog (1982). He uses stop motion animation to create 3 separate short pieces in one film. The first sequence shows two people made out of various elements of rubbish and food and broken bits of scraps. The characters then start to eat each other and regurgitate each other. There is use of sound in this piece to amplify the uneasy nature of the visuals such as clanking noises and crunching noises as the characters eat each other. There is also some tense sounding orchestral music that adds to this mood. This sequence could be representing (from my personal opinion) greed and consumption in the world showing how the more people consume the more disgusting the world gets (this could relate to global warming and distruction of forests that are replaced with ugly buildings or factories to make more things for people to consume simply for peoples desire to have more things) this is shown by how each time the characters eat each other the elements they are made up of get more and more broken and disgusting, theres also some close up unsettling shots of meat being mushed up and attacked which has a very uneasy feel to it as well as appearing rather repulsive. This idea of the characters getting more and more disgusting as they consume more could also represent the people themselves and how consumption is altering their morals and turning them into people who are disgusting on the inside (personality wise). The sounds get worse as this sequence god on, the more the characters eat the more they burp and the sloppier the noises get again just adding to this feeling of unease and making the characters slowly start to appear as though they are evolving into fouler creatures. At the end of the sequence the characters start to regurgitate clay moulds of people who then also regurgitate clay moulds of people, the people looking exactly the same. This could be representing how society today is just creating replicas of people and individualism is fading. And the idea of the final people being made of clay suggests that these people have been moulded by the stereotypes of society that is driven by consumerism.
The second sequence of the film shows to clay people who embrace each other and mould into each other so that human shape is no longer visual, the clay blobs sill move with the occasional hand popping out etc. All though the two figures are no longer representable as they have moulded into each other it is still suggestive that they are embracing each other. They then separate and the figures become recognisable again however there is now also a small blob creature between them trying to get their attention and looking very sad. The two characters seem to not want responsibility of this small creature and start throwing it to one another angrily. They then seem to get into a fight over neither one of them taking responsibly for the creature and start clawing at each other pulling bits of clay of one anthers forms and eventually destroying each other. This small creature could be a symbol of their love as it has no specific form and they seem to get angry with each other when the other dosnt want it. This could be showing how their anger at one another for not taking responsibility of the love made them angry and end up destroying each other or how their love destroyed them?.
The final sequence in this film is of two clay heads producing items from their mouths and helping each other make use of the items for example one of the heads would produce a pencil the other would produce a sharpener and the would together sharpen a pencil. The animation goes on doing this and eventually the heads start loosing rhythm and would mix item up that would go with each other for example they end up sharpening a tooth brush and putting tooth paste on a pencil. the heads then start yo look work out and start to crack and crumble and loose their form. This animation could be symbolising how the daily drag of the same routines can wear people down physically and mentally.
This film shows how it hold surrealist qualities and that it incorporates the throwing of elements together to startle the audience. All of the sequences in this film have a feeling of unsettling nature to them which creates a startling shock factor to the piece and makes it seem more confusing and creates a sense of curiosity about it.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
This is an artist that Svankmajer himself acknowledges himself as an influence for his work. Arcimboldo, active in Svankmajers home city of Prague during the late 16th century and celebrated for his trick portraits in which faces are built up from every day objects such as fruits vegetables and flowers.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527, the son of Biagio, a painter who did work for the office of the Fabbrica in the Duomo. Arcimboldo was commissioned to do stained glass window designs beginning in 1549, including the Stories of St. Catherine of Alexandria vitrage at the Duomo. In 1556 he worked with Giuseppe Meda on frescoes for the Cathedral of Monza. In 1558, he drew the cartoon for a large tapestry of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which still hangs in the Como Cathedral today.
Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, fruit and tree roots, were greatly admired by his contemporaries and remain a source of fascination today. Art critics debate whether these paintings were whimsical or the product of a deranged mind. A majority of scholars hold to the view, however, that given the Renaissance fascination with riddles, puzzles, and the bizarre (see, for example, the grotesque heads of Leonardo da Vinci, a fellow Milanese), Arcimboldo, far from being mentally imbalanced, catered to the taste of his times.
This is a video i found online of an animation that is creating visuals for Williams poem. This is similar to what i will be doing for project A as well as this project and is a good starting point for inspiration for this project. I will be make multiple small experimentation pieces for this project however and so i will not have time to create a full animation to this poem.
SAMULI HEIMONEN
Finnish visual artist Samuli Heimonen through his surrealist paintings uses animals as a metaphor for human emotion. For him painting is a good tool to bring up stuff that you don’t normally see, or you see but don’t understand. This is the basic idea of surreal picture: something quite normal becomes something exiting and intriguing.
He says about his work:
"My works are not about the animal world, but I have wanted to use the animal figure as a metaphor for human hopes, aspirations and fears. For me, animals seem to crystallise in a great way something fundamentally human. An animal or the nature is a mirror which provides an interesting platform to study the human being"
Examples of his work:
I thought this artist would be good to look at for this project as he uses the idea of using animals as metaphors for human emotions in his work which is what Blake is doing in his poem. The tiger is a metaphor of his wonder of the world and his exploration and questioning of the world around him.
From reading the poem one of the themes i picked up on to work with was the idea of questioning good and evil william say did he who make the lamb make thee which i saw as questioning wether the creator was cruel for making animals that would kill one another (a tiger would eat a lamb) as well as how he mentions that the tiger is beautiful and perfect in appearance. He talks about a tiger and who created the tiger but his thoughts are seemingly also referring to the creation of man with the tiger being a means of symbolism in a way. I decided there for to create this piece showing half the face of a person and half the face of a tiger showing this metaphor. I covered half the image with a black rectangle and placed a section of Blake's poem inside of it that allowed parts of the image on this side to come through. I used the section of his poem that says "in what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire in thine eyes" as this is a section that is basically say who created the life of the creature and the use of using the rectangle to show only parts of the image through creates this sense of unknowing and mystery. I have placed this on the side of the face with the tiger in my image to show connection to Blake's poem and his metaphor of the tiger as a means of pondering god, with the normal face on the left side being in a sense the reveal of the pondering of who created man.
To create a connection to the words included in this image also i made the eyes really pop in these images as the text says "burnt the fire in thine eyes" creating a picture of bright burning eyes. I therefore made my image in black and white and had only the eye visible of the persons face. The poem also starts with "tiger Tyger burning bright" and therefore i made the tigers face also in colour to make it stand out and 'glow' in comparison to the black and white face.
I experimented with using different facial expressions for this image and matched these expressions with those that the tiger half of the face is pulling for example this image where the persons mouth is open in a roaring motion i used a roaring tigers face for the tiger. this one is my favourite version as it seems more passionate and could express frustration, connecting to the idea of the frustration of the unknown (who is the creator etc).
i decided to make a small gif of these expressions as they were all fairly similar and therefore would create an easily flowing animation that i thought might look as though the face was actually moving into these expressions. I was rather pleased with the results.
This is the next piece i created. I made an abstract image of a roaring tigers head out of all the words used in 'The Tyger' poem by William Blake. I thought this was a nice metaphor as Blake is creating images and questions with his words so i thought i would take this to a more literal level and create an image out of his words.
I felt like the image above was missing something slightly in order to tie it all together so i added the word tiger large across the neck area of the tiger referring to the title of the poem and in a away summarising the piece.
This is the image i used to create the tiger text image i made. I turned the image into black and white and rounded of the neck with a black brush to make the head floating in a way in the centre of the frame to make it more aesthetically pleasing when i had made it out of words.
This is the text i made out of all of the words from Williams poem. I then copied and pasted this a few times and positioned it over the tigers face and then used linear burn of the image of the tiger to show these words through.
I then decided to make this polly portrait of a tigers face to use in animation i want to have a go at creating somthing where i will make the face dissolve into vision and then dissolve away as this is a visual way of symbolising the mystery and questions that the poem discusses and it is a good chance for me to practise my after effects skills.
I edited the tiger image to give it more of a bold look. This is the image i will used for my animation.
This is the original image i used as a template to make my polly portrait.
SARAH EISENLOHR
In her artist statement Montana based artist Sarah Eisenlohr explains that her collages use places of existence to create fictional ones in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which humans have transformed the earth. These scenes often carry undertones of spirituality and faith. “I consider the figures’ desire for shelter, warmth, and something stronger than themselves as symbols of serenity that I seek through spirituality, while the use of sublime in my work points to a relationship with the divine,” explained Eisenlohr. Eisenlohr uses the collage as a medium in order to transplant the influence of humanity on images of idealized untouched landscapes culled from vintage magazines.
This artists work relates to my idea for my next creational pieces as i want to create some collage work out of found resources. This artist uses photographs to create collage pieces that represent metaphors for how people have effected the world and the landscapes of the world. This idea of using symbolisms and metaphors in the collages relates to the nature of William Blake's poem and how i will be creating my work.
This is the second polly portrait i made so i could use it in my animation as i wanted the tiger to roar at one point in my animation so i had to make another portrait with the mouth open and create a kind of short gif in the middle of my video to make it look like the tiger opens its mouth and roar.
This image below the polly portrait is the real image of the tiger i used to trace the shape of the mouth. I then placed the mouth of this tiger over my other previous polly portrait of the first tiger i did so that when the tiger roars the head still looks the same so it appears to be the same tiger roaring.
I finally got round to creating the animation for my polly portrait tiger image that i had earlier planned on using in my work. The animation has become slightly over polished and flashy and cinematic than my idea had been of to relate to this project but it was good fun and experience for my to try creating these different visuals for my video and i am still pleased with the results.
The sound i added to the animation really emphasises and impacts the visuals i made for example the bang sound when the tigers face first forms in the video makes it seem huge and heavy creating the dissolve effect just prior to this transformation seem even more mysterious as the multiple separate particles seem like nothing on their own.
The colour changes i made to this final version of my animation create a burning glowing visual effect to it and reflect the suggested nature of the tiger the fiery personality. It also creates a more dramatic and eye catching effect (bolder, louder etc).
The final animation i created does differ slightly to my story boarded idea in my sketch book as i have added the word tiger to my animation which was not in my story board and original idea this is because when i came to making the animation the polly portrait looked too alone on the screen and so i thought text would look more aesthetically pleasing with the image. The style of the polly portrait is more graphic and urban in appearance also and so again text compliments this. Also the movement and appearance of the particles in the animation that make up and deconstruct the image of the tiger are different as i explained and planned for them to be swirling however i used a more gravitational style in my animation as the swirling vortex was too difficult for me to do so i had to adapt my idea to somthing i could achieve. The particles were also fewer and larger than i planned on too for the same reason. I added some more "logo graphic" style effects to it swell such as the shine rather than having it how i firstly envisioned as a more pictural and painting style image animation. Adding the shine made it seem slightly more commercial that my original idea but i was also partly exploring my techniques and skill on the after effects as i was making this piece and that was fun to add and i did prefer the end results of this effect. The Light that i had more across the screen and text before the shine was also an exploration of my skill and i had the same feeling about this of preferring the animation with it.
This project requires me to record spoken word of other people that i can use to create an animation for. I could approach this in different ways such as recording conversations i over hear, instigating conversations or interviewing people personally to direct them to talk about certain topics etc.
There are some legal limitations to this however and i must get the people i record to sign a consent form in order for me to use their voice in my work.
"it is not the voice that commands the story, it is the ear' - Italo Calvino
Brief:
Record 1 conversation (refer to ethical and legal limitations discussed in class)
Conduct 1 interview, based on pre constructed questions.
Select 1 section from each source that i feel would provide a rich base for visual response.
a short presentation of my selected clips with analysis focusing on the successes and failures of the processes used and the justification of my choices.
Road:
Jim Cartwrights play Road Directed by Alan Clarke for TV. The scene especially from 8:36 shows a celebration of normal common dialog between characters, the visuals put with it however make it more interesting and although the dialog is already rather out of the ordinary and humorous the visuals that go with it and the way the characters are acting make it very observable even though not a whole lot is going on. Cartwright has highlighted the average lives of the characters and made them amusing in subtle ways.
Creature Comforts:
A really good example of the kind of thing this project relates to is creature comforts. Creature Comforts is a stop motionclay animationcomedymockumentary franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film describes how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public "spoken" by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations.
In this episode of creature comforts the public is being interviewed on what they think about where they live and an animation has been put together to create clever scenes in which it appeared as though the voices being recorded are actually animals talking about their homes and hinted jokes are made by the visuals to match with what the speakers are talking about. For example the crocodile scene the woman is talking about the area being good because there are lots of people the visuals and how the crocodile moves etc suggests that the voice is referring to eating the people.
Under The Skin:
a Science fiction art house film directed by english filmmaker Jonathan Glazer
Those city scenes were captured with tiny, inobtrusive cameras. Many of the people who appear on screen, including some of the men who chat up Johansson's character, aren't actors at all and don't see the cameras. "Scarlett's character was interacting with real people who were completely unaware that they were in a fictional film," said producer James Wilson in an interview released by distributor A24Films. (Permissions were secured after the fact, of course.) This shows how Scarlet Johanson the actor is acting in a way to lead the unsuspecting characters she picks up into responding in a certain way to give a more realist feel to the film but still coming out with the desired end result (which in this case is causing these men to chat her up etc). Suky Best Early Birds: http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_artist/b/s_best
Suky Best is an artist based in London. Working with print, animation and installation, she has exhibited nationally and internationally. Commissioned works include About Running, a moving image commission for The Great North Run, Stone Voices, a permanent sculptural piece for the Devils Glen in Ireland, From the Archive, an animation for the main reception area of University College Hospital London, and The Park in Winter, Arts Council England's online Christmas card 2008. She has exhibited at the Baltic, Gateshead, the Art Now Lightbox at Tate Britain, and has had solo exhibitions and publications, including The Return of the Native at the Pump House Gallery London.
This animation shows the visual depiction of the birds the people are talking about in the narration of the video. She has used various different people to make up the audio for her work which has an effective result as she shows different birds. I could think about different ways of recording people for my own work such as using multiple people in the audio i record.
This video shows a different type of audio where the narrator is more informative for example in this video the narrator is talking about physics and an animation has been made for it to help viewers understand and to make the information being given more interesting and entertaining. I like how this animation has been created as well with each element merging into the next to follow the narrators words and keep the visuals flowing smoothly, for example when the words morphs into a clock.
The first task we did as a group was create a disguise out of newspaper. We decided to come up with a theme idea of venetian masks and then the idea of creating different facial extensions for each mask. We made a nose extension, ear extensions and eye brow extensions.
Smart Works:
main themes and ideas:
Growth:
Symbolisms for how smart works can help the women grow
plants, natural and beautiful symbolism for growth.
Text in the style of vines to go with this theme.
Butterflys:
shows change and evolvement. Coming out of the cocoon (confidence) coming out of your shell. Again beautiful however and feminine.
Symbolisms Of Women:
this charity is aimed at women and to make the art work more personal to the clients and relatable we decided to include suggestive shapes or symbolisms that relate to women. This idea of keep the connection to women merely suggestive makes it easy to move away from 'unrealistic' depictions of women that could have a reverse effect on clients and make them feel insignificant compared (e.g. beautiful model or drawings of beautiful slim women)
main concept areas of the smart works office that our group focused on took interest in and developed ideas for:
we moved the changing rooms more evenly either side of the window so that there was even space on the walls either side of the window for some prints (matching prints)
we decided that inspirational texts inside the changing room would be good as the changing room is usually the more confidence cracking part of the process if people are feeling bad about the way they look. (we can use our growth style text.
Posters of the ends of the cloths rails to tidy up the appearance and brighten up the overall look of the changing and fitting area which would for most clients perhaps be the most confidence knocking part of the process. Look good feel good.
Also we decided we wanted to create an animation that ties all of ideas and works together either for the smart works website or to display in the office space depending on the situation, or even just for personal reasons. Again we want the same styles and themes involved. This way we make our ideas and inputs come to life.
Typography research examples:
Inspirational quotes
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the
life you have imagined.” —Henry David Thoreau
“Trust yourself. You know
more than you think you do.” —Dr. Benjamin Spock
“Happiness is the secret to all beauty; there is no beauty that
is attractive without happiness.” —Christian Dior
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe,
deserve your love and affection.” —Buddha
“Always act like you’re wearing an invisible crown.” —Unknown
“Fall seven times stand up eight”
“Confidence is sexy”
“Happy girls are the prettyest” — Audrey Hepburn
“Give girl a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world —
Marilyn Monroe
“Never dull your shine for
somebody else”—Tyra Banks "like wildflowers you must allow yourself to grow in all the places people never thought you would" "there is no force equal to a woman determined to rise" - W.E.B Dubois "Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you already are" Marilyn Monroe The road to confidence is paved by daily accomplishments" Colour Pallets: i made some starting point ideas of what colour schemes to use by finding images that matched our main style ideas of elegant powerful and feminine:
Starting point research inspiration:
Butterfly and moth symbolisms to reffer to for this project:
http://www.insects.org/ced4/symbol_list1.html
Female, Femininity
The butterfly symbolizes female and femininity for a number of reasons. The “painted” beauty of most butterflies is analogous to the “painted” beauty of a high-fashion model replete with her cosmetic finery.In addition, the graceful walk of a woman compares easily with the gliding flight of a butterfly. A comparison between the lithe, beautiful, graceful butterfly with the usually less-showy, stubby moth might be interpreted as a comparison between woman and man; however, the moth has not become synonymous with men and masculinity.
Butterflies and women share the qualities of beauty, grace. Artists often include butterflies to introduce a feminine touch to artwork, product or advertisement.
Beautiful and Positive
The butterfly symbolizes that which is beautiful and positive because of the widespread and usually valid opinion that they are, indeed, quite colorful and beautiful. This position is strengthened by the opposing symbolism for moths being ugly and negative. Other symbolism assosiated with butterflies (like femininity, spring) also contribute to people’s high regard for butterflies.
Beauty of Nature
The butterfly is a multicultural symbol of the beauty of Nature, appearing in numerous examples of nature scenes of many artistic styles. Butterflies are included as elements of these scenes because they most effectively represent all positive characteristics of Nature.
Logic and prejudice has deprived moths of a similar status. Logically, since most “beauty in Nature” scenes are set in daytime, butterflies are the obvious choice for inclusion. The prejudicial lepidopteral impression that moths are ugly, negative, drab, troublesome (as a clothes pest) and undesirable, overpowers the fact that moths outnumber butterfly species many times.
Ugly and Negative
Shall mortal man be more just than God?
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker?
Behold He put no trust in His servants;
And His angels He charged with folly:
How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,
Whose foundation is in the dust,
Which are crushed before the moth?
Although fantastically beautiful moths exist, many of them live in the tropics. Uncommon, beautiful moths such as (the Polyphemus, Cecropia, Luna) do reside in the United States, although commonly encountered moths are small and drab brown. Compare this to the many beautiful butterflies easily observed in almost any part of the world.
For this reason the moth always comes out second-best in a “beauty contest-opinion poll” against butterflies. Coupled with the stigma brought on by the misdeeds of the clothes moth, these little denizens of the closet are responsible for the tarnished reputation of moths everywhere. It is little wonder that the moth has become the unwilling symbol for that which is ugly and negative. Some of the other symbols identified with moths (like insanity) have also contributed to the moth’s position of low esteem.
PAISLEY VINES
I wanted to at some point in the project include animation within our work to incorporate my course skills into the project. we found some animations with similar themes to our work and that could start inspiring ideas:
this is an inspirational animation we found that has a similar style to what we were thinking of using for our overall animation.
(use this idea but with abstract and merging images of women butterflies and nature then words of confidence boosting)
Deborah Klien:
Deborah Klein was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1951. She grew up in the inner southern suburb of St. Kilda and lived and worked in London from 1973 - 1980. The experience of living in both of these places was to have a significant and enduring influence on her work.
The artist gained degree and post degree qualifications from Chisholm Institute of Technology, Melbourne and Gippsland School of Advanced Education and a Research MA from Monash University, Gippsland.
Klien is a good artists to look at as her themes and ideas are very similar to what our themes and ideas are for our project. She has used the representation of a woman figure however has not made the women look 'unrelatably' attractive as she has their heads turned or faces covered and so the removes the feeling of unachievable beauty from her work.
Deborah's work focuses on exploring aspects of feminine persona, representation and identity.
Acording to Inga Walton (author of behind beauties masks:works by Deborah Klien) she says that deborahs work is exploring the idea of revealing and concealing with regards to how much of ones persona and personality people ever (if ever( reveal to another person. This is why much of her work shows masks.
Klein also states in an interview with NETS Victoria (a company that is a part of a network of touring exhibition agencies) that the women in her paintings masks were meant to be an extension of themselves. So the masks were essentially a part of the womens personality shown with different patterns and colours displaying their individualism. But it is as though this is concealing something deeper.
She also states in this interview that the notion of looking over the over looked has been a central idea to her practice with the moth being a good metaphor of this as they are unfairly considered to be drab when they can actually be bright and beautiful. This could symbolise a hidden persona that is being overlooked in the women she is painting.
Our work relates to this idea of hidden beauty with in a person and when thinking about the smart works clients. In our work we have related this to the inner persona of confidence and emotional beauty within the women and similar to Kleins work we have depicted this idea with the use of a butterfly mask. Our idea however was to have the butterfly instead of concealing a hidden beauty to be showing off this inner beauty and displaying it for all to see and symbolising women wearing their confidence and self love as their fashion and beauty. Kleins work also shows elements of ideas similar to what we have come up with as a group such as not revealing a full image of a woman or a womans body showing only hints of the body or hair as a reference for the audience to make connections to women. We decided to do this with our work also using only outlines of a woman or shapes or symbolisms to make the work appealing to all the clients and not depicting unachievable 'perfect' images of women.
i cut out this shoe design that one member of our group had drawn and stuck it onto a blue background that was the same shade as the smart works logo. this simple delicate look is rather effective and relates to our theme as the item of clothing is suggestive of a woman and there fore relatable to the target audience but the shoe design is made up of flower shapes and butterflies. Both fitting in with our theme ideas.
(adams women prints drawings)
after doing some drawings in the group to start developing ideas we decided to use two of adams drawings of women that he turned into digital prints. These drawings were inspired by our artist research of debora klien and her use of butterflies over women faces, we liked how this in a sense symbolised wearing confidence as fashion which are two things that relate to smart works and that smart works would want to portray as they want to influence confidence and happiness and security for there clients but also want to show clients that there is an element of fashion and retail pampering involved with the free fitting of a full out fit and accessories for the women as well as make up.
we delegated roles to work towards making these drawings of women into screen prints on fabric as we decided that this would be an elegant feminine way of displaying our work and would fit in well near the fitting rooms and the curtains of the fitting rooms etc.
we decided that me and heather would draw up a number of different butterflies to use on the women face so that there was a combination of our drawings all present in one piece.
these are the butterflies me and heather drew to use on the prints for the women to place around their face.
Deciding how we would go about making the screen prints as they would be rather large:
we booked a meeting with kiran the screen printing technician so see how we would go about print images as large as we would need them.
after having the meeting with kiran we found decided that the best way to go about this would be to project the images onto a wall and draw onto tracing paper around the outlines of our images in attempt to make a large template for the screens.
(shading in the block colour for the butterflies, with the layer of the outline underneath on a separate sheet of tracing paper)
for each of the women we made three layers of tracing paper templates as we were going to be using 3 colours for our prints (black for the outline squinting for the face and blue for the butterflies) to do this we had to shade in on each tracing paper sheet where the colour was going to go (e.g. we had a sheet that showed the shaded shape of the face, a sheet that showed the shaded sections of where the colour would be on the butterflies and a sheet of just black outline.
(shading in the black colour for the face)
This is what our screen for the first woman looked like for the black outline. We placed this over our fabric and scraped paint across the length of this screen which pushed paint through the sections of the screen that had the holes of the outline shape in it.
we did however encounter some problems when screen printing these prints as the main layer for the colour of the face was out of proportion, and so the outline screen did not match up with it.
we decided that the best thing to do would be to leave this skin tone layer out all together as this would create a more aesthetically pleasing finished piece and we did not have the time to make another screen as it took a while for these ones to be made (just under two weeks) and we were running too close to the deadline date.
Making The Typography:
we decided to use one of the quotes we looked at earlier in the project and decided on Aaudry hepburn's quote "Happy girls are the prettiest" as it is an inspirational quote that suggests that physical and outer stereotypical beauty is not the most important quality and that happiness is the most important thing for the clients and the most beautiful. The women that are going to Smart Works are on the road to self fullfilment and a personal journey of starting to love themselves and find self acceptance and self confidence. This quote goes in hand with the message that smart works is trying to portray.
i drew up the outline of the quote we decided to use first in pencil in my sketch but which i would then trace over in illustrator to make a digital outline that i could work with.
this is the outline i made after tracing it in adobe illustrator and filling it in on photoshop. We were thinking of making a vinyl cut out of this however we decided that for the exhibition we should make it more of a display piece and colour it as we would have to stick it in the exhibition room instead of the area it was intended for in smart works.
after filling in the lines i then added the butterfly and roses to create a more floral effect on the text and make the text look more like it was a part of plants and emphasise our main themes of growth and butterfly. the butterfly is present to represent freedom and growth and femininity. I used a drawing i made of roses and vines for the flowers and leaves i have added in this piece and one of the butterfly i drew and then coloured them pink to give it a feminine pretty effect.
i used this drawing i made in my sketch book for the leaves and roses in the typography to emphasise the floral vine style of the font inclusion of the plants and growth theme. I also used one of the prints we made of the butterflys. I drew this image first and then edited it in photoshop to look more like a stamp print.
Font i created was inspired by Mathilde Castle land by Maelle. k and Thomas Boucherie
This is the finished piece i made for smart works of a woman with butterflies around her symbolising freedom and confidence. We used the colour blue for the butterflys to relate to smart works and smart works being the means of confidence. I drew this woman in pencil first and then in photoshop coloured it and added images of the butterflies me and heather drew and also coloured them in photoshop. I drew the womans head looking up to represent confidence as this is the body language used to represent this but also to show freedom and serenity "feeling the wind in your hair" type of feeling to it. The butterflies and wings especially of the butterflies as well as this idea of breeze in the womans hair represent flight which is also offend associated and connected to freedom.
I used the golden sector in my image to create a main focal point of the womans face and to make the image more aesthetically pleasing. The face is the main focal point as it shows the idea we had of women wearing their confidence as their fashion the butterfly being worn proudly on the womans face showing how her confidence and independence is what makes her beautiful and that she wears it proudly.
This is the image heather drew before we put it into photogshop and coloured it to go as a set with my drawing of the woman. The girl in this drawing also has a butterfly over her face and she has used the same rule of the golden sector in her drawing to draw attention to the girls face.
This was one of the versions for my pice i made before arriving at my final choice i showed earlier. The floral background is too full on in this piece and draws too much attention away from the main idea of the image and so i toned it down in my final pice. Also the final piece i made the background pink as this is more feminine and relatable to the target audience.
