I chose to further expand upon my journal exercise for Politics and Colour. I continued to address issues in Vancouver again with the posters. This time however, instead of drawing inspiration from WWII posters, I drew inspiration from the posters of the atelier populaire era. An era I did not know anything about before this class but after researching the graphic posters of this time, they are the perfect mixture of bold visuals to go with bold statements. The WWII posters, however effective and ultimately better designed and created. Don’t have the same power as those of atelier populaire. The message is loud, clear and powerful, something I wanted to achieve with my posters and their graphics are just as bold, clear and powerful. They tended to use simple black and whites, strong single colours as well as combinations of the two.
I wanted to silkscreen my pieces by didn’t have the time or the money at the time to do so. So I used simple, bold ink drawings to visualize the messages. I wanted the poster to convey grassroots feeling. Like someone was pissed off, grabbed their sketchbook and started scrawling any message they can with a big black marker. I did the drawings in a sketchpad with a sharpie and brought those into Photoshop to change spot of colour and increase the contrast between the white of the paper and the black of the ink. Somewhat similar to the effects a silk screener can achieve after preparing artwork and then setting up a screen, he has the ability to cut and paste his piece onto the screen and do elements in whatever colour he may wish.
I would want to display these posters in various areas of Vancouver in order to reach as much of the intended audience as possible.
The first poster talks about drug abuse, a larger problem than anyone cares to admit but most people in Vancouver avoid East Hastings to ignore this fact. This poster would be displayed in Yaletown, Shaughnessy etc…the richer areas of Vancouver in an attempt to open their eyes a bit of problems outside the happy bubble. It uses a strong hit of red to attract the viewer and hopefully draw them in enough to actually read it. The semblance of the red to blood is something that may momentarily shock the viewer.
The other poster deals with the 2010 Olympics. With all the homelessness and drug abuse in Vancouver, the province still chose to spend millions and millions of dollars on hosting athletes from around the world for a brief moment in time rather than deal with the issues and throw some money at them to help solve some of the problems. This poster uses the same formula of simple black and white with a hit of colour. This time, the colour is a sky blue. Kind of like the blue used for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic branding. I wanted to draw some sort of visual apparel to that specific year of Olympics since the poster doesn’t incorporate the city. The blue used is very saturated and may not have the same punch as a small hit of red but the blue does pop. Its contrast with the strong black and softer blue is a little bit jarring and almost uneasy, I think would entice me to read a poster a bit further as well.
This poster would be posted around the East Side in and out of skid row in view of the homeless, who the poster is about, and the major roadways to attrac the attention of the drivers that may commute through the East side but don't have nay daily experience with the homeless other than through their car windows.
No comments:
Post a Comment