#i dont love the classic mac design-- the old white one or the new black one

[millenari]

Seven Cat Calls Event

Celebrating my favorite (looking) Cats performers

‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌‌ ‌ ‌ ‌‣Week twenty-one: Macavity

[bellafadiploma]

UNIT 2: The Truth About Everything

To start off this project, we talked to local poet and performer Jonny Fluffypunk, who gave us our brief. We were sent the transcripts from conversations between Jonny and his team and the people of a residential home. I read through all of the transcripts individually and underlined certian quotes I really enjoyed. Most of these turned out to be from the resident Della. I thought she had very interesting memories and insights, especially into things I’m interested such as ghosts and gender and such. Here’s a selection of the quotes i particularly liked.

DELLA: My father had a rat up his trousers once.

DELLA: Yes. I used to say ‘sweet things come in small packets’. And my husband says ‘So does poison’

JULIEN: A rat is a pirate. A mouse is a civilised animal but a rat is a real pirate.

DELLA: ‘Did you often get in trouble?’ Not often. But I did do things I shouldn’t do. Climb trees for a start. I loved climbing trees. I remember lying on the branch of a tree, it must’ve been half an hour, before the policeman went. He came to the playing fields and was looking around and I don’t know why but he suddenly decided to stay around. So I lay along the branch and waited for him to go. It seemed an awful long time

DELLA: I’ve seen a ghost. In Long Sutton. A man in a grey mac. 

DELLA: My cousin did… but it turned out that it wasn’t a ghost. It was a goat. In those days the toilet was outside, and Fred went out and he saw this white thing, and he reckoned it was a ghost.

DELLA: I saw my husband, when he was at sea. I woke up, and I could see my husband standing at the end of the kids’ cot. He stood there, and I said What’s the matter, Eric? Oh don’t worry, he said, it’ll be alright. And then he vanished.

DELLA: Frankenstein never came to our church. But you just think; if spiders were bigger than what they are… Like a tarantula? No. If they were six foot. Six foot in length. They’d be scary then. Absolutely.

EDNA: I always thought I was more beautiful than anybody else. I wasn’t.

What Piece Of Advice Would You Give Us For Life? EDNA: Shut up.

DELLA: She used to pull me along the road on roller skates. Tie a scarf around my middle, say here y’are, give it to the dog, and she’d take off up the road, pull me along. I fell over a few times.

DELLA:Well, our dog Sandy always sat in front of the fire with a budgie on his head. Every day. He’d sit there for hours, asleep... But Sandy knew the time. He could tell the time.

JS: You’ve always dreamed a lot? DELLA: One of my first dreams was when I was tiny; [...] I put the purse in one of the draws in the bedroom, and in my dreams the drawer opened and the little elephant popped out, and I was so afraid I ran, and the elephant run after me. So by the time I was finished dreaming, I’d got the whole house waking up…

JS: Is there any places you would go? Well, in 1963, as a student I went to Lourdes, to the village of St Bernadette. I had acne rather badly. [...] but that day, when I was in Lourdes, there was a storm, I got drenched, then as I say, from that point on, the spots started to disappear. But I didn’t go back. 

DELLA: I can’t remember how old he was. He was in the navy, in one of the destroyers, the arctic convoys. It was so cold, if you touched any metal without your gloves, it took your skin off.

_________________________________________

Here I have put the specific lines I liked in bold.

After deciding which resonated with me the most, I created some sketches

I also had a risograph induction the same day, and tested one of my ideas, which was the image of Della being pulled along the road on her rollerblades. It was just a two colour print but I really enjoyed how it turned out. The vividness of the colours and the sweetness of the blue and pink really helps push the narrative of a childhood memory. 

I decided after this that I wanted to do all of my pieces in risograph after a failed digital illustration attempt. I decided upon this after getting feedback that the story was not clear enough due to the composition of the policeman within the scene. I also think this piece didn’t work due to it looking to flat. I put everything in the foreground, giving the piece no sense of depth or space.

I did some research into different graphic styles for each poster, the ‘policeman’ story, I took inspiration from Enid Blyton illustrations and Tintin. I really like the very cute style of drawing eyes in Tintin, and so I took that into my illustration. I also really liked the look of the callipgraphy pens, so part of the lines are thicker than others, which can be seen in both Blyton’s and Herge’s work. The risograph, I decided should be as many colours as I could do, which is blue, black, yellow and pink. I used gradients and opacity to mix new colours which i think was very effective in the end, especially the sunset sky. I also reflected on my earlier statements about my first attempt at this illustration and added things into the background to create a sense of space.

For my ‘Poison’ piece, I took a lot of inspiration from comics and pop art obviously, but mostly I took inspiration from Roy Lichenstein, which is why i decided to use so much halftone in these pieces. From his work I also took the composition, where he often has a man and woman facing each other in profile. The colours I ended up using in the risograph were pink and blue again, as that combination is often used in reference to candy and other sweet things. The pink is almost sickly however, which adds that threatening dimension that the quote has. Also, my accident, the pink and blue could be said to reflect the energies of the male and female I suppose, if you ascribe to that idea.

for the ‘Frankenstein’ piece, I looked into comics again, especially late 80′s/90s style, such as The Mask, which utilised thick black lines and almost neon colours. I also looked into pulp book covers and horror movie posters for the sort of composition I wanted to use. I ended up going with a classic low angle, low yellow lighting, very much reminiscent of vintage horror films; combined with the halftone to bring it back to that comic book style. I then have Della at the bottom with the quote, as I felt that this piece needed maybe a bit more context.

I also designed another one to put through the risograph, but due to thinking it was a little too simple and not that readable, plus time constraints, I didn’t finish it.

Just before the project came to end, I experimented with doing some more traditional hand coloured drawings and testing colour theories at the request of Alan, however, due to time, none of these really came to fruition. 

Nonetheless, I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. I think the pieces are very striking and reflect the stories of Della faithfully, but still with a flair that means that they dont all necessarily need the context of the conversation and work as stand alone posters. I fell in love with the process of riso this project and would love to use it more in future if possible.