Poster Experiments

poster experiments

The Final Piece for Book 2 will be editing photos of a poster in the scene of buildings and areas I visited in Book 1. I aim for this poster to represent the artists I have covered throughout my project, they will be. Paul Catherall, Shepard Fairey, Tom Phillips and Emory Douglas. As seen in this plan.

Firstly for the incorporation of Tom Phillips I have carried out some experiments with the potential typography element of the poster. The design of the element is inspired by Emory Douglas's work, which is displayed in my response to his pieces previously. I chose to play around with the colours and decided to stick to yellow as it boldly contrasted with the blue I intended to use in the poster (a similar colour scheme used by Douglas). Also, I experimented with different fonts for my message, linking to Tom Phillips, and decided on the more magazine-style "Times New Roman" in bold (circled) as, in my mind, I best depicted the propaganda, magazine type message I am trying to display.

The three posters below are different takes on the image I decided on. In all three I used a beige background to represent the magazine and newspaper pages of Douglas and Phillips. Also, as discussed earlier I used the colour scheme of blue and yellow, with the yellow design above being a result of the typography experiments carried out above. The light and dark blue strips were inspired by the designs of Douglas and suited the portrait/ poster well. The portrait itself was taken from a previous lino print with a depth of layers that show shades well in black and white inspired mostly by Fairey and his layered takes on portraits in his posters.

Poster 1, from left to right, is a simple take on the style of work inspired by Shepard Fairey, Tom Phillips and Emory Douglas. With the photo of the protests in one of the strips, I believe that the message of defiance is portrayed by this poster.

Poster 2 has an element of Tom Philips in the background of the strips and is a newspaper article about the protests post the murder of George Floyd. I incorporated this to relate to the text element of Phillips' work and experiment with additional media. However, I found this example too cluttered and busy so therefore it didn't make the printer.

Poster 3 was developed based on previous work done in my Top Boy research and portrayed the surroundings being part of the identity of the society shown. I did this by editing a primary source photo of one of my chosen buildings in London behind the lino print of my model.

I decided to print the posters that were the most simple yet held the most meaning within my project and (as pictured) were printed in A1 so I could easily capture them in the locations I visited in London in Book 1. I outsourced my posters to a print shop that beautifully printed my work in a high resolution on satin poster paper. I am very happy with how they turned out and can't wait to see them posted up on buildings in London.