Editorial Projects

For the past couple of weeks I've been working on some editorial projects which has been a change of pace after the long and arduous stage set project. I had to produce illustrations for a different newspaper articles each day with mixed results so I'm just posting my favourites (and by favourites I mean the ones which I'm not actually embarrassed to have produced) here.

On the second day of the project I got given an article about genetic engineering. It referred to religious arguments against genetic engineering so I decided to play on that using the idea that people worship the human genome above all else so did a sort of tongue in cheek collage loosely based on old religious art.

One of the more challenging texts was quite a convoluted article from the Independent about corporate tax avoidance and how nation states hold the ultimate power against them - laws hold more sway than money and all companies eventually fail. I had to produce two illustrations of different formats and was restricted to a colour scheme of red and black.

I went for quite a simple style just using coloured pencils and using apple cores to represent Apple which was the company the article focused on. 

For the second illustration I decided to ham up the black red and white colour scheme with its obvious association with Constructivism and use the communist red hand crushing the apple as a bit of an anti-capitalist visual pun.

A Taste Of Honey Set and Poster Design

My first project this semester was a set and poster design on a given play, I was assigned Shelagh Delaney's "A Taste of Honey", a "kitchen-sink drama" from the 1950's.

The play contained lots of themes of motherhood and poverty which I wanted to tie into the poster. There were also themes of homophobia and racism which I felt were more relevant in Russia today than in Britain which is where the play was originally set. 

I did some research into set design and Russian housing and architecture.

For the poster design I took some photos of a baby doll to reference a key scene in the play where a character throws a doll to the ground to represent her own rejection by her mother and subsequent rejection of her child. I screenprinted it with text over it inspired by Constructivism which was a bit of an obvious choice but worked pretty well:

I wanted to keep the set design quite minimal based on tower blocks with an inside/outside section. I used a slide projector to project onto the set and made slides by printing onto acetate and painting and scratching over it with brusho ink.

Berghain Record

Another of my one-day projects was a record cover design on any chosen genre/artist/label which had to include the number twenty as a feature of the design. I looked into a few but decided to go for a "Berghain Greatest Hits" album as a sort of ironic take on compilations playing on the exclusivity of Berghain and how it has almost become a victim of its own success.

I was thinking about the idea of techno tourism and EDM fans coming from the US to experience a scene which ends up being totally different from their horribly misguided preconceptions of dance music. Eventually I went for a design influenced by Russian Constructivism as a nod to Berlin's Soviet past and used the colours of the German flag:

"We don't want you"

Hand Project

Before Christmas we had a few one-day projects. One of my favourites was the hand project - we each got given a picture of a hand and had to come up with a square format drawing - quite a relaxed straight-forward project.

I got a hand which was pinching something and decided to make it into a squid with some nice ink and acrylic drawings which came out pretty well. Here's the final: