Honoring the father of album art: Alex Steinweiss

Honoring the father of album art

Photos from the Final Project

Hey everybody in the Afternoon class, I've uploaded the photos from the final project. Feel free to download/share them with whoever wants them. I'll also add information/credit to y'all if you write me.
The link to the gallery is here

MAMMA MIA!

For my project I was assigned ITS also known as the International Typographic Style and was assigned Theater. I decided to use Mamma Mia! as my theme. Since the international typographic style is very organized I used the buildings as a way of breaking up what the poster would say. Helvetica is the major font of ITS and so I followed that and used it to make the unity and style clear. I had trouble with following ITS and tried to do so by breaking up the background with many different colors. I painted the image of Greece and created a difference between the roughness and picture like foreground with theh basic color blocks of the background.

Emotion + Inspiration (Poster project redesign)

I was dissatisfied with my poster project because I had this great idea towards the end with little time to expand and finish it in time to turn it in. It was inspired by a bad day and my trip to the indian comic art show. So here was what happened so far.

Heroes and Villains: The Battle for Good in India's Comics

I went to LACMA a few weeks ago for this exhibition of artwork from Indian (from India) comic artists. Comics and comic-style cartoons and animation are fairly prominent in my life. And I didn't know what to expect going to this showcase. What is it that makes these comic artists from India special? When I got there I was moved. I didn't know if I could bring a camera, and now I wish I had.

The showcase moved counterclockwise around the room. And started with the older comics. These reminded me of children's books. The style, framing, and color schemes were simple. The figures were fully drawn in a semi-realist fashion, with proportionate bodies and faces (unlike say the Peanuts characters). The oldest one dated back to 1936 with Pratap Mulick's "Valmiki's Ramayana".

I moved on to the next group which was Jeevan Kang's "Spiderman India". I found it funny on first sight just because I've been conditioned by our American Spiderman. But this comic was a Marvel brand and very well done. It was published in 2004 so computers played a huge part in this comics formation. It was highly stylized and completely devoid of the artist's personal style. When I looked at it a few other artists or works came to mind. Like this and all those other works I thought of could have been done by the same person. On the other hand, I think the culture shined through character clothing.

The last set of works came from a design studio called "Liquid Comics". Large preliminary sketches were displayed. And there was a short video about the layering process of going from a pencil sketch to a full comic page. The illustrations on display were pen and ink over pencil. This was especially effective because you can ascertain the artist's style before it gets to the computer. Each work was a storyboard layout of a page. There were a few character explorations in storyboard form. There was a lot of stylistic variety in the works even from one artist. Demons and bakground figures took on an impressionist style while the main character was highly detailed and exaggerated as contemporary Asian animation does with elongated extremities and so forth. These artists used line in a very meaningful way: outlines, line character and thickness, contour lines as patterns to create forms. All of this is progressive. I don't see that kind of line use in other comics. And again being that these comics are about the deities of Indian culture, the characters and settings are fashioned appropriately (ie. apes dressed in cultural armor). Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the Liquid Comics section and was even inspired to try a little comic animation myself.

Plant a Tree

For my poster, I drew the style 70s/Conceptualism and the subject of Politics from the jar. 70s and Conceptualism can be highlighted by the work of Milton Glaser, Seymor Chwast, and Wes Wilson. The style used elements from older styles such as Art Nouveau and mixed them with a strong color palette. Wes Wilson, for example, used some of the same guidelines and shapes from Art Nouveau in his work but added a distinct style of bubble type that filled space.

Most political issues I brainstormed seemed dry or cliche. Healthcare, one of the largest political issues right now, just seemed like something I did not want to wade into as there is so much being said about it at the moment. Instead, I went for something not cliche... or not. I chose the environment as a topic because it seemed to lend itself to the style. Many of my sketches dealt with pollution and featured imagery like smokestacks. The catchy slogan was what held back many of my sketches. While I had some that I liked, none of them were catchy enough. In the end I settled on this poster, with the phrase, "Plant a tree. Save the world one breath at a time." I wish that I would have developed one of my stronger visual ideas instead, but I committed to this.

I intended to structure the overall layout of the poster to resemble a tree, but to be true to the style, I incorporated some of the curves and shapes found in Art Nouveau. In a nod to Wes Wilson, I used a font that filled these shapes. The poster could have greatly benefited from a greater finesse with the text. Much of the text is far too loose and predictable. It is missing the dynamism of Wilson's text.

I also tried a variety of color schemes but many of them made the poster look too much like something produced in the 70s rather than a modern take on the style. For that reason, I decided to go with the wooden texture for a background to emphasize the treeness of the poster. I also put the graphic in a predictable green to blue-green gradient which came out much less powerful in the print. The poster needed more color, though, as it looks a little dull right now.

In terms of improving the poster, I would of course tighten up the text and expand the color palette. The actual method of production also contributed to the failure of the poster. While the method of making the poster in Photoshop may have worked for a mock-up, it created a very stale poster. A much more interesting poster could be made by actual making the print with ink onto wood.

Jennifer West

Experimentation with materials can lead to a whole new world of work. That's what Jennifer West discovered when she attempted to see what would happen to film when it was exposed to not just the normal set of developing chemicals. She creates films that come out in a dazzling array of colors and run at a seemingly frantic pace. The colors and scratches are all results of intentional scratches and baths in liquids. A former teacher at USC, one of her recent works involved students donning lipstick and kissing each frame of the film. The result is a neon arrangement of lip prints strobing along the screen.

West does not intend for her films to be viewed like narrative movies. Instead, she sees them more as abstract paintings that adorn the walls of a gallery. They just so happen to be painted by projector rather than brush. As she showed films during the talk, West was visibly uneasy by the audience watching her films in their whole forms and one after another. When viewed in this manner, the viewer expects a narrative or some sort of story arc. On the walls of a gallery, the paintings are free to be judged aesthetically and the method used to create them can be pondered.

Last year, West created an exhibited a piece at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. For the piece, she took over a large ramp in the middle of the museum and brought in skateboarders to ride down the ramp over film laid out on the ground. For a few hours, skateboarders took over part of the Tate Modern and took their hobby from the street to the unfamiliar gallery. While West had originally wanted to pull skaters in from the street around the gallery, safety guidelines for the gallery forced her to use professional skateboarders. It is an unfortunate compromise that many artists must make when creating art for larger institutions. West said that though it was disappointing, it did not compromise the integrity of the entire piece. After the day of skateboarding finished, she scrambled to develop the film overnight for a showing the next day. The Tate decided to show her film in a theater the next day where viewers watched the film in it's entirety, making West slightly uneasy. While she concedes that the Tate ended up influencing the piece a little more than she had hoped, the overall experience was a good experience that helped her bring her art to a large new audience. In the process, she also got to slide down the Tate Modern on a skateboard.