Tag: collage

Creative Journal: January 2023

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You should as a creative person constantly experience as much as you can so that when a brief comes you’ve got some inspiration already. The whole world gives you stuff to call on. Immerse yourself in the world of culture- both high and low.

Liam Gibson, art director

Happy New Year blog readers!

We are now reaching the end of January and it has occured to me that I can’t not record my creative activites and inspirations from this month. I will be reflecting and collecting my ideas in this blog post.

Ideas and inspirations are likely to float away if I don’t make an effort to catch and record them. This is a lesson I learnt during semester 1 of this academic year.

I’ve began a physical folder of collected printed material. It’s being filled with anything I like the look of. This might be the technique, material, colour or typography. Why didn’t I do this before? I didn’t know I came across so much printed material in my every day life, but this has been disproven. It’s filling quickly!

Printmaking

This month, I’ve been excited to start a printmaking course at City of Oxford College. I’ve decided to create a separate blog post for the coursework progession. Expect to see this in February.

Wood carving this month at City of Oxford College
Embroidery

I’ve picked up another hobby and with some regret- it’s an all consuming activity! Hours go by in a soothing hypnotism.

In my first project, I used satin stitch on a canvas paper. This stitch is used to fill in solid areas of colour. It isn’t a stitch I was confident in beforehand. With practice, I found the number of threads used in a single stitch made the greatest difference:

Beginning satin stitch

I am experimenting with different ways to fill in the areas, between solid single colours and varying the colours in an area. Also varying the direction of the stitch shows me what difference this makes to the overall piece.

I was inspired by the hand-lettered type used for posters by Sam Piyasena. I based this embroidery piece on What the World Needs Now. I used another designer’s design because I’m only at an emboirdery level of a beginner and therefore needed to practice the stitches before working on my own designs.

Further practice, following instructions from this youtube video.

This traditional practice allowed me to explore the various types of stitch (I can’t remember their names.)

These are not my designs.
Sketchbook Update

Recently, I’ve been mainly using my sketchbook to experiment with mixed media.

1 – Mark – making from printing ink and cut – out collage pieces

Below, I used scraps of paper from a printmaking session where I had placed the inky brayer down and accidently made these markings. I liked the textures so much that I thought it a shame to throw them away. In my sketchbook, I combined these marks with images from a magazine.

2 – Acrylic paint and cut-out collage pieces from magazine

3 – Exploring the concept of home

What makes a home? Is it simply the space you occupy.

Furniture pieces dissasembled and reassembled. I used white acrylic paint to represent spaceand the newsprint transfer technique. I used thicker paint for this piece.

4 – Trying this technique again with a thinner coat of the same paint

A thinner coat of paint transferred the newsprint more effectively. The aim of this piece came from a set project in the book Approach and Language, Ambrose/ Aono-Billson. The purpose was to create an image based on a set word-pair. This pair being ‘Hair-Suite’. When considering this brief, I looked at the different definitions of ‘suite’. A musical suite is a collection of musical pieces written to be played in succession. I followed this idea.

I used stitiching, collage and paint to illustrate a woman considering different hairstyles or reflecting on the various hairstyles she has had or will have.

Life Drawing @ Thursday Night Life
Oil pastel drawing
Pencil drawing

It was a pleasure to join the sketchers at Magadalen rd studios for the weekly drawing session. The studio had a warm and friendly atmosphere; providing boards, easels, advice and biscuits! I would highly recommend this group to anyone. I again used a mixture of materials to depict the model (who was impressively still). This is my usual method of switching up drawing tool constantly. I now wonder if this is a way of me avoiding dedication to one tool and stitcking with the challenges of that material. I usually like to see my drawings in different colours and textures out of curiosity.

Creative Writing

Hidden Spire is a creative collective based at Arts at the Old Fire Station in Oxford. For the first writing session, we took inspiration from the poet Marechera. I prefer appreciating and analysing literature than writing itself. This is only because I don’t feel talented or confident in my own writing. I was impressed to hear the prose poetry written by my fellow group members. Their individual voices came across and each with a different message to share, despite being given the same brief. Being part of a group discussion is something I greatly enjoy.

We looked at segments of Marechera’s work (below). I noticed that he expresses a state of day-dreaming which suddenly collides with the reality around him. This conflict seems painful for him. I like the clear imagery and honesty in his writing.

70’s song lyrics (David Bowie and Prince) helped to inspire us and get our minds into the era when Marechera would have been writing.

For encouragement, we were told to ‘write anything’. This helped me let go of self-critism. (Below) pages from my sketchbook.

Human Animals

Donna Mann’s exhibition at the Old Fire Station gallery captured my attention. Can you guess why? …Mixed media.

This show expressed our interconnectedness with all of life. I liked the element of things being hidden and things being revealed across the space. I felt that I was seeing the expression of life within its smaller details, such as the moth. My eyes made connections across the various elements of life that were placed beside one another.

The carbon of the stars became life on earth. Mann’s installation traces an exploration of healing, friendship and transformation.

Carbon love.

From dark matter to light.

Arts at the Old Fire Station
Victoria & Albert Museum

I took a trip to London and headed for the V&A for the Beatrix Potter exhibition. I took photos of the posters along the walls in the tunnel betweeen the underground and the museum. These are the designs that most appealed to me:

The V&A has a photography section which I visited first. From having completed the Exhibition Visual System module last semester, I took notice of the design of the exhibition. For example, the metal type used for the title of the exhibition (below). This was a perfect choice, since the exhibition focuses on industrial photography.

Artwork by Donna Ruff

Photos from the Beatrix Potter exhibition:

Graphic Design Reading Material

Reading novels is an automatic activity for me. (If you’re wondering, I finished The Buddha of Suburbia this month and have moved on to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)

But this month, I have intentionally made more time to read a small selection of the many graphic design books I have laying around. Reading them carefully instead of dipping in at random allows me a greater understanding of the subject and helps me pick up ideas I would have otherwise missed. Reading about specific designers, their work and methods gave me the most satisfaction.

Wolfgang Weingart

The radical father of the New Wave movement, Weingart taught his students to move beyond the rational swiss typography of the time. ‘Weingart reacted to existing standards by pushing typography to the limits of legibility and beyond.’

Wolfgang Weingart
Crystal Goblet Analyogy

The essay The Crystal Goblet by Beatrice Warde is an articulate piece of writing describing good design. Warde illustrates this idea using the metaphor of a wine glass. She suggests that we use a wine glass to be able to see and therefore appreciate the appearance of the wine as part of its enjoyment. An opaque cup would hide the appearance. Good design highlights the message and content. A well chosen type means we wouldn’t notice the choice of type. An ill chosen type would stick out awkwardly.

Poster, Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe (Exhibition of European Applied Arts), 1927; Herbert Bayer; Lithograph;

I really like this bold and obvious use of the modular grid.

Fabien Baron

Editorial design in different publications. I really like his use of type and the way it merges into being illustration as well as the heading. Images from this page.

Rachel Anderson

Rachel Anderson is a young designer based in Florida. I like her designs based on the work of Tibor Kalman. The design was inspired by his work.

Thirst/ Rick Valicenti

Rick Valicenti’s design combines the weapon and the effect of violence in these powerful images using skulls.

Stop the Violence (book and trailer) by Rick Valicenti

Final zine evaluation

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I used different images, combining photos of my figure with photos I had taken around Oxford. This allowed me to express different elements of the narrative. For example, printing the brick wall image over the image of the figure’s face expresses a stubborn or trapped state.

Black and white is suitable for a zine generally because it cuts down printing costs, but I also feel it helped to create the mood I wanted in this story. The zine begins sad and the greyscale helped me to show this.

I pulled inspiration from a variety of sources, such as the song lyrics, personal experience and zines I have seen in the past.

Looking at graphic design books was also helpful in informing my ideas. Books such as The graphic design idea book : inspiration from 50 masters, Fanzines by Teal Triggs, The fundamentals of creative design by Ambrose/Harris, Behind the zines self publishing culture, and Visible Signs : an introduction to semiotics in the visual arts . Buying 2 zines from etsy.com was useful because I could see how another artist would approach zine-making.

Looking at photos of zines on the internet was important because it allowed me to see how a physical zine can be constructed. I didn’t take every idea on board but absorbing these ideas allowed me to be creative and apply my own methods to zine making. For example, I looked at the posterzines by people of print and although I liked the way all the information is compact on the one sheet of paper, I did not want to go down this route with my zine. Since my zine is about a story of change, I wanted it to physically read like a book, with pages that could be turned and a narrative that could be slowly revealed to the audience.

I considered the bookbinding methods we were introduced to in Ruth’s workshops for module 002. These methods informed the direction of the physical format of the zine.

The use of cut-out text reflected the theme of the zine. My zine is about breaking and fixing. Both emotionally, physically, and metaphorically. The way I glued the words together, forming them from separate found letters, helps to represent this narrative.

I used exclusively collage for my zine. (I did not use drawing or digitally produced images). I stuck with analogue methods for this extended project as I wanted the zine to feel handmade and personal. The cut and paste method I used for the images gives the same impression as the repairing theme mentioned above.

Once I got into the making of the zine, I took it in my own direction. I was still reading and looking at research material throughout but I felt like I needed to tell my story in my own way. There was a point in the process where I did not feel the need for outside input anymore. This was after I made the draft zine. My research period was more near the beginning of the project.

I have avoided copying any one design, but have been influenced by elements such as the distortion used by Sofia Clausse in her zine about ‘the windy city’. The distortion in her zine was a reference to the windy weather. In my zine, the distortion represents change and mental health.

I struggled with knowing how long to spend on each area. For example, I did a lot of experimentation because I felt I needed to explore my object and how to present it on paper. This was not much of a problem in this semester but did lead me to feeling overwhelmed. If I had set time limits for each task, it might have helped me keep on top of the module overall.

Collage experimentation

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Isabel Reitemeyer

Collage artist based in Berlin. What I find interesting about her work is the variety of techniques she uses in her collages. Each collage is different and surprising. She experiments with the physical quality of the paper. Sometimes folding it like a fabric and other times cutting the paper with a scalpel.

Images from isabel reitemeyer (@isabelreitemeyer) • Instagram photos and videos

In this image, she has cut the paper carefully into a smooth curved line. The area of the face stands alone on the page. Cutting an area out is an other way of concealing an area, this adds mystery.

I like the choppy style of cutting within this collage. It reminds me of a smashed window. Some lines are parallel but the piece is asymmetrical.

The white area hides the image behind. Because of its shape, we see glimpses of the figure between the branch-like shapes. The flat quality of the white area balances out the depth and blackness of the photograph.

Cutting out sections of an image means you can re-arrange them on the page to your liking. The medium of collage means you can be selective with what to include. In this image, I am drawn to the shape of the negative/white space.

I like the way Reitemeyer plays with layers in this piece. The shape she has cut from the yellow paper acts as a frame for the image behind. The choice of plain yellow draws the focus to the figure. If she had used another image for this top layer, it might look confusing or flat.

I like the way she has broken the image into sections. To me, this symbolises something broken or unsettled about the character or narrative.

When starting the project of making my final zine, I wasn’t quite sure where to start. I needed to generate more ideas about the context, layout and visual elements. Having experimented with format, I was happy I had 3 possible formats to work with.

I began to take photos with my phone camera. I focused loosely on the themes of water, home, fragments and seasons. I took the following photos:

I converted some of the images into black and white before printing them. I used these photos as collage pieces to incorporate into my sketchbook along with the image of my chosen object, the raincoat girl.

Before & after photoshop/ camera RAW

I softened the image and turned down the saturation.
Softening this image make the photo look smokey and dream-like.
Collage experimentation

Within my sketchbook, I began experimenting with collage as a way to play with ideas for the zine.

I printed the photo of the raincoat girl figure in black and white. I photocopied the photo while moving it around on the scanner. I liked the effect because it gave a wavy underwater feeling.

I placed the photo back into the paper compartment of the printer. I then printed the image of the puddle on top. I found that the combination of the dark areas and lighter image underneath worked well.

This experiment wasn’t as effective because the background is darker than the photo I printed on top of the background.

I printed this page from the book The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey. I chose this text because of its reference to seasons and the idea of rebirth. I like the combination of colour with black and white.