Saturday, March 29, 2014

Creating Art with Impact: Poster 2

(click on image to enlarge)
Wind storage
Posterized painting, computer collage, watercolour and crayon
©2011 Charlene Brown

The steps I followed in compiling these ‘sustainable technology’ posters, following the ‘tangential process of creative ideation’ described in my March 5 post, LINK are as follows:

1: Print the title, or main idea of the poster. This should be attention-getting and clear in the case of regular posters, and attention-getting but perhaps a little ambiguous for art posters. Add some background illustration, appropriate to the theme.  I’ve used posterized versions of watercolour landscapes. Posterization of an image entails conversion of continuous gradations of tone to a limited number of value levels and colours, with abrupt changes from one to the next

2: Introduce some secondary objectives and possibilities or even tangential ideas. The additions to the posters are collages of words relating to Economic and Environmental considerations.
3: Compose a very simple outline diagram of a possible solution, which could be based on a few of the ‘labels’ identified in Step 2.  I did the diagrams in crayon on square-ruled paper because I like the ‘look’ this produces, and the grid provides straight lines (always helpful) and facilitates scale drawings.
4: Transform the diagram. Make it bigger or smaller, reverse or invert it by mirroring the image, take something out, combine two diagrams etc. whatever it takes to fit it into the poster. Add annotations. This will incorporate another one of the contrasts between regular posters and art posters. In a regular poster, illustration labels would be succinct; whereas illustrations in an art poster can be annotated with as many of the pieces accumulated in Step 2 as can be fitted in. I had to steer myself away from putting together a montage, in which all the bits are more or less readable.  What I really wanted was a collage, which I think is more suitable for this concept of introducing relatively random ideas…
5: Give names to your ‘solutions’ to the objectives posed in Step 1. Remember it doesn’t have to be obvious how these things are going to work.
The steps as shown in this second example:
  1. objective: solve ‘new technology’ problems.
  2. secondary factors: collaged word pattern
  3. diagram: wind turbines
  4. transformation: run it backwards
  5. wind storage