http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9018309t/f1.highres
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Each student was given a draw from a box to see what theme we had to create a stencil of. I got'Factory'. My first thoughts for factory are the production lines. The conveyor belts of made to order items. Playing with the anti-establishment punk themes I opted for a 'made to order war' using the conveyor belt as a way to transport ammo and bombs/bullets.
As the design has to be simple to cut out I had to consider minimal approaches to get the desire effect so I made use of movement lines and simple shapes. While I like this design a lot, as a stencil it was a little bit too dainty in parts and I should have left larger gaps between certain parts of the image to keep the paper stencil strong and to avoid ripping.
After creating our first stencil we were given another lucky dip for a quote to overlap our previous stencil, I got "Submission ends it all". These words are strong and bold and when planning out the composition of them I had to consider the shape of letters with parts in the middle and the overall layout of the piece.
the quotes we were lyrics to the song "bye bye man" by the stone roses. This song relates back to this movement as discussed here: https://www.radiox.co.uk/artists/stone-roses/why-do-the-stone-roses-have-a-lemon-as-a-logo/
When combined together my two pieces looked like this:
I had some extra time to create more stencils so I pulled a different key word from the box, this time I got 'Police Officer'. Going with the traditional slang of calling British police officers 'pigs' I decided to stencil a pig in a 'bobby' hat.
I decided to make a pseudo 3D effect using the blue and red on the stencil out of alignment with each other. To finish it, I used someone else's type as I liked the idea of it being misspelt. It gives an odd DIY punk feeling to the image as well as mixed signals through the types misspelling.
looking at similar processes that are cheap and DIY I decided to make lino-cut stamps. The lino can be carved into in a similar style to the stencils to create re-usable stamps for posters or whatever you want to ink. The cutting process is limited to carved and not carved to give desired effects so the constraints of that helps creative thinking.
The stamps I created were inspired by Hayao Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movie 'Spirited away. I decided to re-create two of the creatures from the movie. The first was the 'soot sprites', their small and simple design made them quite easy and transferable to lino.The second was of no-face. This character has a partially transparent body which i thought would lend well to different carving techniques. With this piece I tried to intentionally create a chipping away effect that will be more effective when used with ink as it can leave a faded effect.
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The creativity that comes with quick and cheap graphics is something I have enjoyed exploring and can see myself doing more of in the future. I don't see myself as a "hands on" kind of person but these tasks have made me see the joy in limited colours or materials and I would love to explore this type of work more.
