Exercise: Paper Circus

Brief

Create a poster showing what’s on, where and when, an editorial piece about the show or an advert, but only use paper to do it.

You could use coloured paper, work with collage, cutting and layering, folding or sculpting. Be creative in your approach to image-making and typography.

Scan or photograph your final piece and reflect on how the limitation of only being able to use one material has affected how creative you can be. Was this limitation a help or a hindrance?

Evaluate the results in your learning log: What were your aims? What were the challenges? What surprised you? What might you take away from the process?

Plan

I went online to look for events or anything new that was happening and came across my local cinema that is hosting a 'Crash Festival' where creators across cinema, gaming and comics were coming together to do talks and such. I thought that this event would be a great way to blend what I'm interested in and the intended aim of this exercise.

All this event is about is creative cultures, so I should include iconography of those specific things or find a way to create subtle imagery, the design of the poster itself has some cool imagery with chromatic style into it.

I would like to attempt doing a 3D paper sculpture or incorporating some artists from the previous research task, like Hari and Deepti who used light to enhance their artwork. I want it to feel like it could be a part of the events, and a lot of the people and companies that are there particularly work in creating unique stylistic media (like Across the Spiderverse, and Love Death and Robots).

Mood-board

I wanted to include a lot about VFX and one of the attendees are specialized in VFX so I took some pictures from what they have worked on, and included some initial ideas design wise to look for.

Ideation

Process

I wanted to get the inspiration from my last research task to this exercise and found a random box in my house that got me wanting to use for this. I played around using different materials to see if I could get the chromatic aberration effect that is used in the title to contribute around the paper cuttings.

I had sticker paper that was holographic, I tried a multi-coloured mini led light, but ultimately came to a realization that it might be too difficult and costly to create this effect. However, when I used a post-it note to jot down key words to think for imagery, I grabbed my coloured post-it and realised that light could pass through. If I can't get the light to create a diffusion light then I could make the paper a different colour to imply the effect.

Several days later...

After several days of thinking about it, for a first project, it was very ambitious, therefore I took my original thumbnails and proceeded to just have fun with it. I've rarely worked with paper and paper cutting alone, so I thought I should just experiment with the design. I didn't want to move away from my mood board, I still wanted the inspirations to help me experiment.

I knew I wanted to capture the VFX aspect of the event since it was a pin-point identification to what the main showcase is, so I incorporated so lightning effects with the paper and painted it back so the white of the paper backing would come through.

Then I used the imagery taken from the ideation process to produce some simple visuals to play around with on the paper, then adding more paper on top the get an (attempt) 3D look.

I knew that I wanted to use simple colours and found myself using pinks, red and purple; using pens and pencils to create the line art. From there, I experimented with highlighters to give the (attempted) effect of chromatic aberration that is common in VFX and animation.

For the text I used the same font as the original photo, however adjusting and personalizing it to better suit the overall design.

From there, I scanned the design and took to procreate to add the last of the text and slightly adjusting the colours to make it more saturated and make the white and black stand out more.

Final Product

Evaluation

Even though I started out with being way too ambitious and wanted to do the light box, I'm not mad with how the end result turned out. I really like the lightning effect with the paper, where I carved out the lightning from the paper-- and it really started to come together when I painted it black and added pencil around the cut-out to give it a glowing effect. I was surprised with the outcome of the lightning since I didn't think it would look so effective after applying pencil.

With the influence of my previous research, I learned to play a lot-- rather than get bogged down to doing something incredibly exciting that others of a higher level have done.

It did take a while to play around with the text but I tried to think of what was key information and make that bigger or bolder to get people's attention.

I did feel like there were some challenges that I had to adapt what I usually do to complete this task, I'm used to fixing up a drawing by rubbing it out and redrawing-- whereas in this case every cut was final, and so I had to take extra precaution or adapt the design. For the lightning a few times the cut-out went wrong and so I had to either cut out another piece or apply paper to add to the shape.

I ended up really enjoying the experimental aspects of this exercise., which I would take away with me as I progress forward.