Illustration class - Visual poetry

In my illustration class we had a project called "Visual Poetry", where we had to use typography and image to illustrate a short piece of text - poem, story or a quote of our choice. This was probably the most labor intensive project since I was going to school the first time. But I really like the results and it was definitely something new and exciting. Though the smell of aceton that I had to use wasn't my favorite.

A little bit about how it was created...
Soo, I came up with the design based on this extremely short story of 2 sentences by Daniil Kharms. (A soviet era Russian absurdist writer and poet, whom I like very much.)

And then I started contemplating on the medium. Since the shapes were so bold I thought paper cutouts would look good. But then I looked at the number of letters in my design and really pitied my hands that would have to meticulously cut all that out. But fortunately our teacher is very resourceful. She showed us this really cool technique of Xerox copy transfer. Where you take a laser printout (or a copy), turn it printed side down and using a blender marker (a special colorless marker) transfer your printed image onto another paper. The texture looks very cool. Grungy, newspaper-ish. So I decided to use that in combination with cut outs.

I started out by drawing the figures.

Then I brought these into Photoshop and added text.

Then I printed out my designs in red and black. And began by transferring the red image. About half way through, the blender marker ran out. So I ventured out to a hardware store and bought half a gallon of aceton (which apparently is the main ingredient in that marker), and then used the marker as my rubbing tool (so it wasn't a complete waste of money).

The next challenge was to align the facing down black print with already transfered red print semi perfectly. Semi, b.c. I wanted to show some red through the black, but didn't want it to offset so much so that it looked like a mistake. So that took some time. And then I enjoyed another healthy portion of acetone. And voilà, I had the letters.

 And, finally, came turn of the X-acto knife and rubber cement. And few hours later I had a finished handmade poster on my hands.

This was a pretty exciting project for me. I really like making stuff by hands but a bit scared of experimenting on my own. This turned out to be a truly mixed media poster which by myself I probably would never have done. That's why I like this class so much – I am learning new media and get to practice it too.