Design Report

Robert Wilkes – Unit 38 – rwunit38.blogspot.co.uk

WOMAD Festival Posters

I had decided to base the location of my posters in Alidade Australia an existing location for the festival. I wanted to use the iconic lion logo of WOMAD in both my posters as I thought it would help viewers will recognize what they are trying to advertise. Before making my posters I gather many different fonts that I felt would work with the WOMAD theme and ideology and created a series of colour boards that I felt that would work with WOMAD.

The first poster I feel I over edited and added to much colour, which is why I believe my second poster is much more effective. Like with a lot of my work the ‘simple is better rule’ applies after I removed a lot of elements when making the second posters I felt it looked more professional and worked much more effectively.

Mixed Media Collages

The two posters I have created both follow the sane theme of machine meets human. The first poster has a heart wired up to plastic pipes and gauges acting as a pump and the second one placing eyes within CCTV cameras. I fee that the different images in both collages work well with each other and are effectively blended.

To make the first collage I had taken images of plastic piping and used stock images of a heart and gauge’s as these were items I did not have access to. To make all the images work within each other I duplicated every image twice and applied the same layer blending options to each one from bottom to top Normal > Colour burn > Overlay. By doing this all the images in the collage fitted together a little smoother with only a few edges needing touching up with the Smudge tool. The Background was a paper texture I had scanned in and edited using the Curves tool. The last piece of editing I used the Eraser tool and lowered the opacity to fade out parts of the collage.

All the techniques I used on the first poster I repeated when constructing the second one to give both collages a matching look. I prefer my second poster as again I feel like it worked better and look more profession and well constructed.

Final Collage "Always Watching You"

Like with the last one each of the cameras had the same layer treatments. Each layer was duplicated twice and the following blending options applied Normal > Colour burn > Overlay to give them all a similar look. Some burring as applied using the Burring tool to make them fit a little better. The eyes were all stock images placed in the lenses of the cameras and merged in using opacity settings with the Eraser tool.

Final Collage "Part of the Machine"

This collage was very fun to make but took a lot of time. I already had the heart image but I had to go through many different pipe images to get a few that matched the angles of the veins and arteries. After this the rest was very easy to make. All the elements were duplicated and used the same layer blending options Normal > Colour burn > Overlay to give them all a similar look which in turned help them to blend in with each over in the overall collage.

Artist Critique

Robert Wilkes – Jesse Treece – Unit 38 Mixed Media Collage

Treece’s main works used images/pages from vintage magazines and books to create simple but surreal collages. The use of the vintage imagery created a unique, recognizable style in his work. His work focuses on interpreting the simple and complex elements of modern living. Treece often used images of space and children to create this distorted perspective on day-to-day life often merging simple items with absurd ones.

Over Jesse Treece’s career he has made many collages in this style and has worked on many collaboration’s with different collage artists and has worked for a number of different projects. He sells prints of most of his work and has been featured in art galleries magazines and interviews in multiple countries.

Treece uses the same techniques across all his work. As stated his images come from vintage books and magazines, which are hand cut and put together as a collage. His works often tend to be very eye catching and unique in their appearance some of which are highly detailed pieces of work. Asides from his subject matter Treece uses a very common way of making collages. His work is obviously done in more detail but the method of a cut and paste collage is one of the more traditional ways of working.

Due to the use of vintage imagery most of Treece’s collages have a common colour scheme and appearance to them. This does not only make his work very recognizable but lets the different images he’s gathered work with each other in sense of colour and style. With a digital collage this would be done in, for example, Photoshop to make the colours match and blend more effectively.

Although the style that Treece has used can be seen in many digital mixed media artworks. Working this way digitally would massively speed up the process at which these collages can be created.

Digital Collage Research

This work comes from the Skizzomat Illustration Dairy, a creative outlet for the Marie Luise Emmerman out of Germany. Although not exactly what I aim to create this will provide good reference for what i want to make in my own collage as they have a similar area of work.

Digital Art Collage Research

Although these collages don't directly link to the collage I want to create I found each of these interesting in different ways and feel will inspire me when creating my collage. 

Brief Proposal