DADA

As a result of the negative reactions brought on by the first of the world wars Dada was the creation of primarily French and German artist, writers and intellectuals who banded together to speak out against the war and other matters which would have been sensitive at the time.

They let their voices be heard by creating art and poetry that would have been thought to be unconventional and provocative at the time.

Hannah Hoch was one of these artist and she focused here art at  on highlighting society’s views on homophobia, sexism and racism. Hannah hock was also thought to be an early pioneer of the photo montage technique (along with raul hausman).she created her work by hand cutting out all images and text used. below is an example of her work.

Her work below dose not seem to have a sense of structure or clear written message and she has created her pieces in such a way that the viewer has to piece together the message using the images and bits of text provided.

element of humour here and there

rauhl hausman also used the photo montage technique and like hannah hoch he kept the use of text to a minimal. On the odd occasions he used text it would be half seen or set at angles that make it hard to read.

Other than the collage technique the dada movement also had other artists using other methods to get their voices heard.for example artists like francis picaba and tristan zara used methods which relied purely illustration and type .

although their work didn’t make much use of photographs like hausman and hock, picaba and trzara use text to make a sort of text montage.

the image below is one of picaba’s works. in this piece he manages  to keep the DADA sense of randomness and disorder by using different text styles of varying size, colour and shape.

The final image is chaotic and not really easy to understand  due to the fact that through the use different sizes and styles of text, some of the messages get lost and overpowered by others. plus theres no real focus point were the viewers eye is drawn towards.

tristan tzaras work is much more clearer and slightly more structured than picabias. unlike picabias work were theres no clear focal point, Tzara uses the weight of the text to bring more focus to areas were he wants the attention to be. his work still maintains a sense of randomness but in a more controlled and cleaner way. he achieves this by making all the text 45,90 or 180 degrees, i think this adds a sense of order which without, most of the information would have been lost in the chaos(like picabias).

when compared to hausman and hocks work i think this method  correctly used (like tristan tzara) is a better way to relay information to the reader mainly because of how a written message is easier and clearer to understand than one you have to figure out the meaning to. its more practical for a poster which requires more text, like a festival poster

more of picabia’s work

the dada movement later died out but you can clearly see the influence it had on other movement and artists.

artists like Jamie ried (image below) who’s  typography has a similar style to tzaras in which he uses different typefaces for the different letters in a word. doing this makes his work look a bit more disorderly like the Dada artists iv looked at. Also his work is usually controversial and somewhat offensive like Hannah hocks.

After looking at 4 original dada artists and an artist inspired by the movement , i decided to create a poster combining some of elements seen in their works. my poster would be based on an on going comedy tour by russell brand titled ‘the messiah complex’ and i wanted use images that would reflect some of the topics he discusses in the show.

throught the duration of the show russell brand is trying to explain why he is like 4 of his hero’s, Gandhi, Jesus , Malcolm x and Che Guevara, so i used famous images of them them at the bottom.

i roughly used the pen tool to go around the body of the subjects to give of the effect that the image has been cut out by hand and then in the style of hannah hoch,  to placed a cut out if jesus’s head on top of Gandhi’s body. i also added a white outline to shapes of the images.

the messiah complex is when a person thinks themselves to be the second coming of Christ. in the show Russell brand constantly compares himself to Jesus and then eventually calls himself the second coming of Christ. There is also a part when he mentions a story of him stripping down infront of the police.

in the poster i combined the idea of him having a messiah complex and the police incident by taking the image of him stripping naked and placing it in front of a crucifix. i then added some pins to the palms of his hands to suggest that he is being crucified, like Jesus was.

for the text i tried to make in the style of jamie ried and tristan tzara by changing the typeface of every letter and setting the words at different angle.

Dada final poster review.

when i was researching dada i got the feeling that they created their work with the purpose of turning peoples heads (for good or bad )and making them question the meaning of their work. with my final piece i tried to do this and i think i achieved my goal, mainly because without an explanation people would probably not get the meaning behind it, get offended then regard this piece as nonsense (much like most dada work was treated).

although i used modern techniques and combined elements of some dada artists to make a practical event poster i dont think iv fully managed to modernise it.

(image below was an experiment at trying to create something similar to picabias work in photoshop. i tried to modernise his style by using modern methods.)

BAUHAUS

the bauhaus was a german school created with the intention of designing practical and visually pleasing products, the products they created ranged from furniture like lamps and sofa’s to….

in my research i noticed that all of the original bauhaus works looked very flat and 2 dimensional mainly because of how they just consisted of text, simple geometrical shapes and a color scheme that only relied on three colors. all the graphic work produced at the bauhaus to had a heavy focus on the text.

Herbert bayer had a massive inpact on what the work created at the bauhaus looked like when declared that all work produced by the bauhaus would only use lowercase sans serif text

he created a sans serif text which he hoped to be used universally. the font was curvey and simplistic .today is still used widley around the world mainly because of how it has failed to age.

although  restricting the text to only lower case was revolutionary and and helped shape the look of dada at the time.

Today in the modern world it dose not have as much of an impact as it did .

i also looked at joost schmidt whos work has a simplistic feel to it like many other dada works ive seen. in the piece below he uses a combination of geometrical shapes to create an abstract shape in which he bases his text around.

when looking at some of his work i started to notice how he seems to make everything in a piece look united. nothing is by itself and the text is placed in such a way that it curves around the main geometric shape, keeping his work tight and controlled.

The piece below is more of an exhibition piece and it was not created with the intention of practically representing information however..

Laszlo-Moholy-Nagy’s work (below) looks more practical. by that i mean in terms of representing information in away that is less distracting and more coherent.

i think Nagy created a  more efficient way of relaying information because of the minimal and simplistic approach he took with this design.

he only uses one shape and only changes its width to suit the area it has been placed(using the shapes to create clear divisions between information). Everything is at an easier angle to read (90, 180 degrees). and minimal use of color (only used when highlighting certain areas).

for my own poster i wanted to create a more commercially viable and more modern version of lazlos Nagys work for a festival. mainly because i thought that i could take advantage of the way he used rectangles to segregate and coherently represent information.

The first choice i made about my poster was the colour scheme, i wanted to use the official festival colours pink.white and black and i knew i wanted to leave most of the background empty as i thought this would bring more focus on the text and help bring a sense of.. to my work. i also wanted to used an overly saturated and vibrant hot pink because it would bring more contrast between all 3 colors.

i then decided on the font i wanted to use. i used a sans serif font like most bauhuas artists use but it is related with the festival theme. the font i chose could also be linked to a festival because it looks like the stencils used on band equipment.

i created the centre piece of my poster using the words evolution festival. i wanted everything to be united/conected like joost schmidts work i looked at earlier, so i decided that all the words should stem from a certain point in the main part of the poster.

the images below show me experimenting with the location of the festival line up.

final poster below

russian constructivism

Before creating my own Russian constructivsm poster I looked at the works of known Russian graphic designers at the time and the works of modern day artist’s whose work seems to have been influenced by the originals. One of the first constructivists I came across was Russian graphic designer alexandr rodchencko. He created his work using a combination of paint(usually bold and high contrasting colors) and cropped grayscale photographs which have been taken out of context which added a surrealistic element to his work. In some of his graphical work (images below) rodchenko uses symmetry to help guide the viewers eyes towards a focal point or any other point of interest. The symmetrical layout he uses is only really effective in doing this when he either angles objects or places images of people looking in the direction of the focal point which is usually at the center of the page. Like most Russian constructivists at the time rodchenko uses a straight very blocky typeface with minimal curves. Using a type face like this meant that the text would sit easily into a box or next to any straight edges.

The next Russian constructivsm graphic designer I looked at was Gustav kluttiss, a Latvian graphic designer and photographer whose work was bold and visually interesting to look at mainly because of how his pieces were centered around photomontage’s in which the subject looks like its towering over the viewer. The photos he used were taken at an angle, either looking up or down at the subject, doing this allowed him to bring a sense of depth and dimension into his pieces. Klutiss also uses a very similar font  to the one used by rodchenko (which looks like it’s all capitals) and when he couples it with a highly contrasting color scheme and dark grayscale images the resulting posters look very strong and bold.

the 3rd russian constructivist  i looked at was el lissitzky, unlike the other 2 designers i looked at  lessitzky’s work is very minimal, less cluttered and he barely uses any images. his work is purely graphics. he just uses text and the basic shapes (Bauhaus) to get his messages across to the viewer , i think this is a very effective method because of how there is very little to get distracted by .

after looking at some oringinal constructivist work i started looking at what other people have done using this style with modern technology

for my own poster i chose to base it around the opening of a local laser quest venue. i knew i wanted to combine some of aspects of the artists i had researched, the first of which was aleksandre rodchenko’s symmetrical lay out, if i did this that meant i could easily direct the viewers eye’s towards the centre were the main bits of the information would be. another thing i wanted to take from my research was the minimal and simplistic approach that lessitzky took when creating his work, keeping my final poster minimal looking the focus would be drawn towards the information on the poster. The other thing which i didn’t want to change from the original works was the use of the grey scale image because if i used one for the background it would keep to the minimal look i am going for and it wouldn’t take away from the message carried in the text.

when creating my poster i started by  taking one of my own images of the local laser quest and desaturating it then adjusting the levels, and curves to maker the light colours lighter and the dark colours darker. after that i  cropped it in half and reflected it on the other side doing this allowed me create a perfectly symmetrical background that i could start working on.

i then later cropped the background image to the dimensions i had in mind for this poster.

before adding any graphics and text on top of the image i printed of some copies and started to sketch out some designs i had thought of to see how well they would look with the background.

 

after a few ideas i came across one which i felt like did a good job in relaying the information in a simple and clear way. this design also created a sense of depth/distance because of how the text gets smaller as it gets higher up the page .

when creating it in photoshop i used the darken layer effect on the everything that was the color red (the effect used by one of the modern posters i looked at) because felt it made the graphics and text fit better with the image than the solid colors would have. dong this also made my poster look like a modern version

in my research i noticed that the constructivist designers used straight block like text which looked like it was in the upper case all the time, so when choosing a font i chose one which fitted that description but at the same time it didn’t look too threatening and disheartening to my target audience (13-18 males). also because  i chose a typeface whch is very blocky in its nature meant that i could easily place it against straight edges and inside rectangular shapes like some of the constructivists did (gustav kluttiss).

overall i think that my final design is a good  modern take on Russian constructivsm because of how it uses combined elements of the originals to make a adapted and practical poster.

(i spelled the word laser wrong in the poster)

final poster

For my movie poster I wanted to create something with a similar style to one of the artists I researched (Shepard fairy) and Although he creates his work by using paints I was sure I could create something with a similar style digitally by making a vector portrait of one of my own images. After choosing a photo which i thought i could make a convincing-ish movie poster out of i took it into illustrator and started using the pen tool to make silhouettes around the larger and more distinct parts of my subjects face like the outline of the hair and head. after getting the base of the head shape and hair outline done it was just a matter of turning down the opacity of the base shapes so i could see underneath and outline the shadows beneath (although i knew i would be changing the skin tone colours later, using a realistic-ish skin-tone pallet really helped when constructing the face.)

I repeated this process a number of times until I had all of the shadows and highlights in place

I then added all the other parts of the body and repeated the same process on them. (using some vector portraits as reference to see what the finished thing should resemble.)

the images below show the results of one of the first ideas i  came up with the. The idea was just to cut of the rest of the body so the viewer would just focus on the head. I used  a V shape to do this because i thought it could be linked back to the title of the movie “DEV” (called the movie dev just because i couldn’t think of a name so i just used the name of the person in the photo) after a while i decided to add other v shapes in an attempt to make the head bust a bit more interesting. when choosing a font text i really didn’t put a lot of thought in to it so i just thought the the bust looked something from an old russian poster so i just thought a russian fitting font might be fitting.

once i knew what the lay out was going to look like i tried different colour combinations with the v shape and background.

  

After a while of tryig color cobinattions I started to think that the posters with color just looked a a bit like they werent thought out or looked a bit rushed so I  tried to make make on final one with a bit more thpught into it.

The image below is my final version of the poster.

(artist research) feng zhu

Feng zhu is a well known American concept artist who has worked with various Hollywood studios and game developers throughout his career.  After studying architecture at the ‘UC Berkeley’ and industrial design at the ‘art center college of design’ in Pasadena his career began in 1997 where he worked for ‘origin systems’ (today known as Electronic arts) creating futuristic backdrops for movies and games. The image below shows one of many concepts he created for the ‘star wars revenge of the sith’ movie. in this particular image he has left the construction lines in to show us how he composed this piece, you can clearly see that he has used perspective drawing methods to give of the illusion that the spaceship in the center exits in a  dimensional environment. This is made clear by how all of the straight lines are converging towards one point which seems to be located in the top left corner. In the movie the sith are depicted as the bad guys so by using dull colors that have evil connotations (red and black, usually linked to the devil)  the viewer can quickly pick up on the fact that this is the layer of the villains.

Another example of how feng zhu creates the illusion of depth in his environments is shown in the image below. Although it’s not finished and it does not contain any color feng zhu still manages to convey a sense of depth and distance by just using different values (value- how light or dark a color is).  As you can see in the image below he manages to give this piece a sense of depth and distance by making objects which appear to be closer darker in their value where as objects in the distance are lighter in value and harder to make out (if you look into the distance in real life this will happen)

In this next image feng zhu applies this method of giving his pieces a sense distance but this time he uses colors. When adding color he makes the closer object more saturated and darker and the farthest colors dull, desiderated and lighter. Also in this image he manages to draw attention to the focal point (the mountain in the top right) in many different ways. The first of which and most obvious is he puts the brightest color on the highest mountain in the image, since human eyes are almost always attracted to bright colors first doing this should ensure that the first thing that is looked at is the mountain. He also takes more subtle approaches in the way he brings attention to the top right of the image, for example the three characters located at the bottom left of the image are all looking at the mountain, if the blue glow of the mountain didn’t grab the attention of the viewer straight away after looking at the three character the viewer might get curious as to why they are staring into that direction if they do their eyes will be directed to the mountain.  Another way he brings attention to the top right corner is the way he uses an unseen light source (coming in from the left side of the image) to light what seems to be a path which leads to the foot of the.

As well as his environment concept designs feng zhu is also well known for his vehicle, creature and character designs. For the 2010 remake of the movie tron feng zhu was given the task of redesigning some of the vehicles otherwise they would have look a bit dated. On the top left I put the image of what the original tron bike looked like, the rest images below show the different variants feng zhu came up with while redesigning this bike. As you can see feng zhu was not trying to completely redesign the tron bike but instead he just improves and modernizes the original bike, he does this by making the body of the bike look more modern and practical than it originally did (making the body of the bike streamline and making it closer to the ground like bikes today). When drawing concept for vehicles feng zhu’s style of drawing changes (this can be seen in his other vehicle designs as well). He doesn’t put as much effort into painting but instead he focuses on getting as much detail to show through the line drawing, im guessing he does this so when his designs are being looked at or someone is trying to recreate them they don’t have to struggle trying to find all the detail.

Education has played a big part in feng zhu’s career so in 1998 he to created a website in which he uploaded free tutorials which helped people who wanted to become concept artists. The site quickly grew popular so he decided to start uploading his videos to YouTube. To date he has uploaded 68 video’s in which the topics range from character design, painting techniques and how to make a professional looking portfolio. The image below is from one of his earlier tutorials, in this tutorial he mainly focused on the composition of a painting and using value.

After his online successes in 2009 feng zhu created the FZD School of design which is based in Singapore. His school specializes in teaching pupils the skills that will be needed of them if they intend on working in the entertainment industry. The course his school teaches cover a range of topics such as video games, consumer products and films.

i totally agree with you it needs annotating right ? 

Game of thrones poster (fantasy)

for my alternative fantasy poster i drew inspiration from the 2 posters.

the first poster which inspired me was this house baratheon poster down below. in the poster you see a sigil of a rearing stag with a metallic finish on it and some text reading ours is fury beneath it.

for my first poster i decided to incorporate 2 aspects of the house baratheon poster into my own. the first aspect i wanted to use was a metallic looking sigil and the other was the house’s motto on the bottom of it. in my poster i decided to use the house of greyjoy, the sigil for house greyjoy is a squid/octopus and there motto is ‘we do not sow’.

before starting any work i looked at some already existing design’s for the greyjoy sigil and i found two wich i liked and decided to base my own design of them.

this was my own design.  

i took my design into illustrator and used the pen tool to trace half of the image(i used illustrator to do this instead of photoshop because i find it easier to trace and move objects in illustrator). i found that my hand drawn design was not entirely symmetrical so instead of tracing the whole squid/octopus i traced one half and copied and pasted it ,reflected it, moved it into place and then i joined the corresponding pieces to one another. using this technique meant that i would have a perfectly symmetrical squid/octopus after joining the corresponding pieces i colour coded them so i knew which part was which.

after i was done in illustrator i took the vector image i had created and placed it in a photoshop document. to get the metalic effect i desired i would have to paint it. the first thing i did was pick a shade of  yellow which i thought closely resembled gold, i then made that colour darker for the shadows. i used a soft brush with the opacity realy low and and the flow to about 30 percent (the flow controls how many times you have to go over an area before it reaches the set opacity levels ) to lay down the shadows and the main colours.

i went over the area i was painting a couple of time each time turning up the opacity of the colour. to blend the colours i had to put the two colours i wanted to blend next to each other using the soft brush(this created a new colour between them) and then use the colour picker to pick up the colour which was between them and used that colour to blend the two main colours, i repeated this processes until i was satisfied with the results.

in some parts of the image tried to depict the tenticles bending and twisting, this can be seen in the image below on the right.

this was my final image. to be honest the squid/octopus didnt turn out to be as shiny and as metalic as i wanted it to be maybe i will come back to this image once i know how to make a metal effect.

my first attempt at making the poster was not the best thing i could have done and did not look like anything i had hoped to make originally but i did learn how to make a smoke effect and sparks. as a direct result of giving up on it this poster still remains unfinished

when compared some might say that my second attempt of the poster was a huge improvement although it is very simple in its design. for this poster i used the squid/octopus i created as the centre piece of the poster, i then added a border around the edge which was similar in colour and placed the greyjoy motto ‘we do not sow’ and the name of the show at the bottomof the poster ‘game of thrones’

when i was done with that i thought the poster looked a bit boring so i decided to make a new layer and a render a cloud effect in it i then changed the settings of the layer from normal to overlay and dropped down the opacity, doing this gave the poster a sort of uneven look to it (this can be best seen in the poster below on the left with the leather background). in an attempt to make the poster look a bit bore interesting i tried using different backgrounds (you can only see one because i only took a screen shot of this one)

hare are some of the variations i made for the poster (i personally prefer the one with the solid black background.)

for my second poster i drew inspiration from the  image below. in my poster i wanted to incorporate certain design aspects of the house stark poster, for example i really liked the gritty feel of the poster and the way the house sigil is made out of the words used  in their house motto. before i started working on the actual poster i tried to draw the greyjoy sigil in the same way as the sigil below. unfortunately i could not make an octopus/squid out of the words ‘we do not sow’ so i just ended up using the vector image i made in illustrator earlier.

i started by finding a pattern online which i liked and and then i used the select colour range option to select all the black and then on a new layer i filled the selection with a shade of yellow which looked like gold.

the next steps after colouring in the selection was to add a gritty texture abd to zoom in onto onto a part i liked, i then put some black diamond shapes on the image to cover up the bits i wanted to put text on.

the bit of the image i originally intended to put  the text on was a textured gold background but then  i realised that the black text would just simply blend in with the whole poster so instead i decided to just keep the background black.

the last thing i did to the poster was to add a rendered cloud effect on an overlay layer with the opacity dropped down to about 30%, doing this gave the whole poster an uneven feel.

this was my final poster

 

nearly finished

Shepard fairey

Born on February 15^th 1970 shepard fairey is an American graphic designer and illustrator. He attended college at Rhode Island school of design and graduated in 1992, this is where he first started his propaganda campaign whilst experimenting with phenomenology (marketing something that does not exist/ the process of letting things manifest themselves). Shepard fairey first became known in the skateboarding scene in south Carolina for his André the giant has a posse sticker which then later evolved into the obey sticker we know today.

the obey sticker was made by shepard fairey to be an experiment in phenomenology and the sticker itself had no meaning at the start . The obey sticker was made to stimulate the curiosity of the viewer, it works by taking advantage of the fact that people in today’s world are conditioned by the constant bombardment of adverts to think that when looking at an advertisement the intention of it should be clear from the very start. Fairey used his knowledge of phenomenology to get this sticker famous, he did this by putting as many stickers as he could up in as many places as he could and soon enough people started to notice them and started to question their meaning and why they were there. Fairey later made a clothing brand named ‘OBEY GIANT’. Since the sticker was intentionally made with no meaning the reactions and interpretations of the people who view it is ultimately down to them, for example if a paranoid and fairly skeptical person were to view this sticker they might come to the conclusion that it is from an underground cult or some evil organization, on the other hand if a person who is rebellious in nature views the sticker or the products the brand sells they might either buy the products just because they see that it is trending with their peers even though they might not fully understand the meaning of it or buy the product because they understand that the sticker is associated with a rebellious background (it got famous by defacing buildings and breaking the law).

some of  Faireys most recent works seem to have been heavily influenced by old Russian propaganda posters and the works of andy warhol. for example the poster on the bottom left is an old Russian propaganda poster and the one on the right is shepard fairey’s. When compared it is very obvious that fairy has clearly drawn inspiration from the poster on the left, fairey has used a similar colour pallet but updated the colours to look a bit more vibrant and bold. he has also used a similar design in the way he uses his lines, all the lines situated in the star of the propaganda poster look as if they are converging towards a spot in the centre of the star, this gives the star a sort of dazzling effect plus it emphasizes and directs the viewers eyes to the hands holding the hammer and the sickle. shepard fairey uses this technique a number of times in his work to emphasize and direct the viewers eyes to an images focal point, this can be seen in the 2 images on the right. in the first image fairey uses the lines to direct the viewers eyes to the image of the eye staring at you while on the image to its right fairey uses the lines to keep the viewers eyes in the centre of the image.

the other huge influence i see in faireys work is andy warhol. andy warhol was an artist most famous for his pop art prints of celebrety’s using a limited colour pallet of just three or 4 colours. the influence of andy warhols popart can clearly be seen in some of the works of  shepard fairey, for example the images on the left are the old works of andy warhol. in the images of marolyn monroe warhol select certain aspects of the image and changes the color to something you would not normally expect. shepard faiirey took this technique and improved on it by making the features of the image much much sharper  and using a consistant colour scheme in most of his prints.

to date by far the most known and recognised pieces of faireys work is the print he created for the first of obama’s  presidential election. in the print he uses the methods he used for  the other portraits

the walking dead poster (horror)

the image below shows my very quick sketch of what i wanted my poster to look like. in my sketch i didn’t put lots of detail into it because i wanted the idea to be flexible enough so that i could make changes and add stuff onto it if i needed to (stuff like colour, typeface and the main image) .

for my ‘the walking dead’ poster i took an image of the internet of the main character rick Grimes, i then flipped the image, took out the background, desaturated it and used the levels option to adjust the black and white contrast. after doing this i went into the select menu and picked the colour range option i then used the colour picker to select the colour i wanted (black) Photoshop then made a selection of everything that was black in the image, all i had to do next was to colour the selection Photoshop had made with a black brush then hide the original image.

the next step was to make the poster look gritty, this involved me adding texture to the poster by getting a concrete wall texture of the internet and then desaturating and playing around with the levels option until i was satisfied. after that i made a new layer over the picture of rick grimes and the texture layer i then used the select color range option to pick up the lighter blacks in the image and once again photoshop made a selection just of the lighter blacks, i then painted the selection using a shade of red to make it look a bit more gory. for the main image of rick i had to drop the opacity down to 50% so that the texture would show behind the image then i used the colour picker to select the bits i wanted to be red.

after getting the main image to look the way i wanted it to the next step was to add some text to the poster. i used the text tool to create the text and change the font of it. i then had to change the colour of the text, use the fx option to add a stroke to the letters and drop their shadows. that final step was to add spots of red and black to the text, i achieved this by using the same method i used to add the red colour to ricks face and shirt(droping the opacity and using the color range option to select certain colours and texture underneath the text then painting them with the same shade of red which is on the background).

this was my final image

alternative poster designs