Project Aims
The first part of this project will tell a story about culture, freedomand other issues surrounding Middle Eastern women living in an Is- lamic country. As someone who grew up in an Islamic society and encountered these issues every day, I have decided to produce an exhi- bition, focusing on portraits that tell a variety of stories. I believe that the majority of women living in Islamic countries try to minimise and conceal the problems that they face on a daily basis. However, in my opinion, exposing these problems will not only help these women but also remove some of the uncertainty and ambiguity regarding the caus- es of these problems. For the sake of authenticity, Middle Easterners will also be employed, where possible, to create the puppets that will be used during the performance. Furthermore, the atmosphere and set must be authentic and completely Islamic.
Creating computer-generated portraits as opposed to hand-drawn portraits
I began by scanning the portraits and converting them to vector images using a piece of graphics editing software called “Illustrator”. Converting the scanned portraits to vector images did not alter their appearance, Then I changed my style to more globalization style, Using this technique, I tried to incorporate circular and rectangular shapes, as can be seen in the image below. The results of this technique were visually attractive but I felt that the more subtle details and orig- inal meaning of the portraits were not captured intimately enough by the clean, computer generated lines and shapes. I therefore conclud- ed that the most accurate and reliable means of presenting a portrait would be to draw it by hand.
Laser Cutting & UV Print
I concluded that the best option would beto first transfer a print of the design onto the acrylic and MDF sheets,and then cut them using the laser cutter. I began by arranging the por- trait, in a rectangular template, using every available colour. Once the print had been transferred to the sheet, as can be seen in the image below, the respective sections were cut by the laser. However, this pro-cess presented one major problem: fixing the different pieces together that had been cut by the laser was an extremely difficult task due to thefact that each portrait included very small and intricate details.
Shadow Theatre
Once I had prepared the first portrait, I visited a photography studioand looked for a material which allowed light to pass through it. Pho- tographers often use an expensive material known as “??”, or some-times a fine, net curtain as a cheaper alternative. As can be seen inthe photographs below, I was able to capture beautiful, dark shadows using both materials but unfortunately they were not useful for ex- posing colour. Other types of specialised lighting and materials were therefore needed to expose and capture colour effectively. Ironically, this problem would not have arisen had the portraits been made using acrylic rather than wood. Of course, this project is merely intended as a potential idea for a puppet theatre but I tried to experiment with every available technique regardless.
