School year 3
Contemporary Muchas
(Made by Thijs)
Concept phase
We started off this project by brainstorming ideas by ourselves. After that, we discussed which one was the best.
These were my concepts:
1. A series of mosaics;
2. Illustrations of the employees of the restaurant on shirts, paintings, the menu, etc.;
3. A series of stained glass windows;
4. Create a corporate identity for the restaurant in art nouveau style;
5. A series of reliefs made of wood, metal, or some other material;
6. An augmented reality app that makes our Mucha artworks move.
Thijs also thought of a concept similair to my number 5 and together we picked that one as our concept.
I made a sketch to illustrate what the main layers of the artworks were going to look like:
Countless variations are possible when working this way, and we liked that. It'd make it possible to be more flexible in making layers.
We started discussing what materials we were going to use and ended with 4 different "themes":
1. A relief made of utensils, like pull tabs of cans, caps of soda bottles, matches, etc. It would refer back to the bar of the restaurant and what kind of products they sell;
2. An industrial theme, with materials like gears, pipes, a bicycle wheel (instead of the flower wheel some of the Mucha drawings have), etc.;
3. A natural theme, with stones and rocks, wood and maybe even plants. Think of cacti, plants that don't have to be watered very often;
4. A relief entirely made of wood. With wooden ornaments and engravings.
Yara also made materialboards for these themes, which you can see on our joint website.
Because Yara, Thijs and I weren't present during the first meeting with the client, we didn't know he specifically said he wanted the art to be made in wood. When we discovered that, it made the choice very easy.
To illustrate on what the reliefs were going to look like in the end, I made a manipulation of a Mucha as concept art:
I replaced the circle of flowers in the background with a round, wooden ornament. At this time in the process, we weren't sure yet if we could "print" it in colour or not, so I made the colours a bit softer.
We thought of what characters we were going to display on our artpieces. I don't really recall on what was on the list of possibilities, because it never got uploaded on our Dropbox.
We decided to go with strong women from the history of Europe and started picking potential women for our assignment. We could initially choose between 14 women, but we did some research on them before we were going to make our choice.
I did research on these women:
Mata hari: Mata Hari, Margaretha Geertruida (Griet) Zelle (Leeuwarden, August 7, 1876 - Vincennes, October 15, 1917), was a Dutch exotic dancer. She was found guilty of espionage by the French and executed for treason. Beautiful woman with lots of possibilities for beautiful clothes in the artpiece.
Catharina II of Russia: (Stettin, May 2, 1729 - Tsarsko Selo, November 17, 1796), nicknamed Catharina the Great (Russian: ЕɤатеринаВеɤиɤая, Jekaterina Velikaja) was tsarina of Russia from 1762 to 1796.
Ada Lovelace: Augusta Ada Byron King, Lady Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron. (London, December 10, 1815 - Marylebone, November 27, 1852). She was a British mathematician. She is known for her description of the "analytical machine", the early mechanical computer for general use of Charles Babbage. She is now seen as the designer of the first computer program because she wrote "programs" to manipulate symbols according to fixed rules with a machine that Babbage still had to make at that moment.
Maria Theresa: (Vienna, May 13, 1717- November 29, 1780) She was the ruling arch Duchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary and Bohemia from 1740 to 1780. In addition, she was married to Emperor Frans I Stefanus and in that also made her the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire from 1745 to 1765.
We voted on what women we were going to elaborate and picked these four:
- Flora Sandes;
- Florence Nightingale;
- Jeanne d'Arc;
- Mata Hari.
We did some more research on these women. I picked Mata Hari.
Mata Hari
(Margaretha Geertruida Zelle)
Mata Hari
Real name: Margaretha Geertruida Zelle.
Born in Leeuwarden on August 71879 – died in Vincennes on October 15 1917.
Until her 18th, she lived with several relatives and followed an education to become a kindergarten teacher, for a short time. She was taken off the education by her uncle because the director began to make avances.
On her 18th, she responded to a contact advertisement in the newspaper. It was of KNIL captain Rudolph MacLeod. They married in Amsterdam and later left to Dutch India, where their two children were born. Margaretha studied the Indian traditions and culture for a long time and became a member of a local dance group. In 1902, the couple returned to the Netherlands, because of increasing marriage problems. On June 10, 1907 they divorced. According to the books written about Mata Hari's life, her husband was a drunkard and half crazy.
After the divorce she started her career as a dancer. Initially, she mainly performed in Paris, but went on to travel around Europe later. Because of these trips and because she was often in political, military and political circles, England suspected that she was a spy. A radio message from the Germans, which was intercepted by the French, revealed that Mata Hari was indeed a spy. She was arrested and after a short trial sentenced to death on accusation of treason because of espionage for the Germans.
On October 15, she was executed by a firepower.
For a long time it was not entirely clear whether she was actually a spy. There are many books written about her in which speculation was given about what the truth is. In the 1970s, German documents were released, stating that Mata Hari was employed by the Germans in the fall of 1915. She was indeed a spy, but not as important as France had thought.
For a long time it was not entirely clear whether she was actually a spy. There are many books written about her in which speculation was given about what the truth is. In the 1970s, German documents were released, stating that Mata Hari was employed by the Germans in the fall of 1915. She was indeed a spy, but not as important as France had thought.
After her death, many films have been made about her and she has been transformed into a legend.
I also made a moodboard for Mata Hari, to gain inspiration for when she'd be drawn. Since Mucha's painting partly revolve around flowers, I added two kinds of flowers at the bottom. The frangipani - and jasmine flower. They grow in Indonesia and I thought they'd be fitting for her artpiece.
After this, we had to make a presentation of our work and present it to our teachers. For this, we had to elaborate on a couple of points:
- Debriefing of the assignment;
- Research of the target group;
- Elaboration of 2 personas;
- Elaboration of the concept idea and a description of this, in a concept;
- Communication of the visual style through moodboards, concept art, etc.;
- Communication functional design.
I worked out the underlined points.
After all of this was brought together, I made the rest of our presentation.
Pre-production phase
We tried to scrum and put all of the tasks on post-its. Yara and Thijs later divided them between the members of our group. According to that planning, it was my job to make the characters. Everyone got to make four layers and the work was pretty well divided.
I started working on the characters, beginning with all of their silhouettes. I collected pictures of each of the women. Some of them are very pixelated, which made it hard to see the details. I filled quite some parts of the drawings in myself, because the photograph was too dark.
The first one I made was Mata Hari. To guide me, I traced the outlines of this picture:
After that I made Florence Nightingales' silhouette. I didn't really know what she looked like so I picked a photo to partially trace again:
Next was Flora Sandes:
Suddenly the tasks were getting divided again and it was decided that Pam was going to do two of the characters. She picked Mata Hari and Jeanne d'Arc. When she wanted to start working on Mata Hari and use my silhouette for that, Illustrator gave her a message, saying that there was a linked file she was missing. It was the picture I used to trace. Pam thought the file had become corrupted and at the time I wasn't able to check it out myself, so she made a new silhouette.
I started adding details to my two characters and began with the clear lines of their clothing and faces. I was going to add the smaller details later.
This is what they looked like:
After a lot of editing and changing the thickness of the paths, I added more details, like folds in the clothing and wrinkles in the face.
After this was done, I uploaded them to our Dropbox after which Yara edited their size to the final proportions.
Since one of the layers of Mata Hari's artpiece wasn't made yet, I decided to take that one on me. I wanted to make it look a bit like the stages she used to dance on; with curtains, bead chains and other decorations. The first thing I wanted to try was making the curtains, but after a feedback session with Yara, I decided not to do that. We agreed on the fact that it would make the top of the artpiece too busy; it might lead the attention away from the character. She advised me to make pillars, so I did some research. To gain inspiration, I put together a moodboard:
After I studied how they are put together, I made my own pillar. I combined parts of many different pillars into one (and then copied that one). They look like this:
I really liked how they turned out, but I wanted to add something more. Using jewelry she wore on pictures, I created my own set. I laid them on top of the pillars, as decoration.
Because some parts of the jewelry could become weak when cut out, I decided to add an outline, just like Yara did with the flowerlayers:
This was the last layer I had to make.
Production phase
During the last weeks of the project I visited the printshop a couple of times, mostly together with Yara. We asked for information and informed if there were errors. I also did research about what kind of wood we could use and where we could buy it. Since the schedule of our process had been kinda thrown over, it wasn't possible for us to make the actual end products. We decided to make a prototype out of wood and prepare the rest of the illustrations to be made in metal; when we visited the client he suddenly wanted us to make everything out of metal, not wood.
On our joint website, you can read about everything we made. Yara put it together:
https://yaravandersterren.wixsite.com/mijnsite
Thank you for reading!
