NATURALLY - ROMANO PARISH
On our art college our class was introduced to a new project to work on for several weeks, for 12 lessons long in the span of 4 weeks. We had to follow a certain guideline of process and documenting throughout these lessons to eventually get to our final results, which were three posters meant to be made for a certain use. In my case, i had made a series of three posters for a line of fictional books. Everything on the poster was made and produced by me, and here are the results i ended up with:
I am personally quite happy and satisfied with how these managed to look in the end, as they all give the same kind of vibe of being a mysterious yet disturbing line of fictional stories, all within the context of nature, whereas the project name "Naturally".
However to get this very result, we had to go out and collect materials and shoot photos of the nature near our school. We went to a park and i went along with two of my friends to go out to shoot over 50 pictures and around 15 materials collected around the park to use in our upcoming projects, which i personally found a lot of fun. As i will not show all 50 pictures directly, here's what i have shot:
When we had our photos and materials, we made use of said materials to paint them and paste their marks onto paper to experiment for possible patterns and uses for them to further our progress and broaden our use of materials and resources for the eventual posters we had to make. I honestly didn't like doing this, i'm not one who likes to get their hands and clothes covered in dirt and soaked in paint and unremovable ink. I also barely had any ideas on what to do with the materials, so i didn't make as many as i have taken pictures. Regardless of that, these are the experiments i have made:
The lesson afterwards we were tasked to combine both the photos and the handmade experiments in photoshop and apply some other effects to make a purely experimental series of 50 different photoshops to then pick the best of them to use in later parts of this big project. Each of them were made between a marge of 2 to 8 minutes and i spent a total of 6 hours on them to give them a twist. These are the photoshops i managed to produce, along with a few of the best photoshops i thought i made:
We were tasked to assign the best of them with certain feelings, atmospheres and possible functions we could apply to them. The following image is in dutch, and it also has some notes of which i had eventually picked some of them to use further into the project:
I thought of different functions for each of them, but i eventually had to stick to just one function to make it part of the same series. So i chose the book cover. My other choices i would've made was a poster for a book/writersclub, a horror movie poster, an experimental music concert poster, or an ambient music album. Each image had their own vibe, and said and seen before i picked the more obscure and tension filled route.
Then it was revealed we had to make all of this for the posters we had to produce in the end. For making the posters, we needed to know more about typography and learning about applying it yourself. We had to learn about being creative with letters basically. This was my study and doing on the typography:
Can't say i'm proud of them but i guess it kind of helped me understand typography a little more...? It was a little fun i suppose.
Then we were given an assignment to practice with limited typography and colors, to design smaller and lower effort posters of celebrating the 60 year anniversary of the font "Helvetica", from 1967 to 2017 (in fact, this page is written in Helvetica). Having limited resources does kinda push your thinking, and i think a lot. So doing this was actually quite fun, these were my Helvetica posters:
On the same day, we were also given the information and lessons on how to design a page with texts and images, knowing how to lay-out a page basically. This was my study on laying out a page:
And eventually, the time arrived where we could finally work on our posters. Now it was time to combine everything we had learned into these final works, the final products which i had shown in the very beginning of this post. I had pulled my own creative spins on the covers, giveing them all different names and subtitles, each with the same genre of story, but yet a different tale to tell to them while remaining similar or familiar to one another. For this fact, the author of each fictional book has stayed the same while the titles change. I will now show progress of each poster during all the time i worked on them:
I had used one of the experiments i thought fit best for the obscure horror style, and started adding more to it such as (drop)shadows to make it look more intimidating.
For this poster i wanted to try a different style, as the title remained in the same kind of style, the experiment i initially used as background didn't do the title justice. I was given feedback of how the background did not contain the same vibe as the previous poster, mainly due to how the previous one had red in it which made the title more suitable in terms of design. So i implied one of my previous handmade experiments in it to further complete the poster to give it its current design. I also changed the grid as i realised thanks to some feedback that making a roster will not help as much as making a grid specifically made for the poster.
When i got to making my 3rd and final poster, i realised i wanted it to have the same nature like vibe as the first poster, and i used a completely different experiment which was not in my top 5 experiments i chose. It simply just fit better, it felt much more "natural". The changes i applied in this one was that unlike the first poster, i added another one of the handmade experiments in it, and i had changed the direction of lighting which was present in the previous two posters. It felt a lot more naturally for me to work on this one, and for that i think this one alongside my first poster turned out the best.
With all of that being said, it was a long, expansive, but a fun project to work on nonetheless. It brought me out of my comfort zone a few times but it didn't necessarily mean it was a bad experience, as i myself have learnt a couple things or two. I think thats the best way to wrap this up, as one of these posters will be printed as an actual poster and i look forward to see it happening. Thank you for your patience and willingness to read through this whole page, i'd always apprecaite some feedback or a reaction to my work so feel free to do so.
