'Do Something Good' - screen printing task

At the time of me making the scamps for possible print designs for this project i was also producing roughs based around American street food, for my Vis Coms Brief. I knew i wouldn't be using food as the final theme for that project, but i did really fancy drawing a giant monster hot-dog or mutant donut and try fitting it into this particular brief. The two-colour rule was also at the forefront of my mind too, i was always very vary of making something to complex where only two might not be able to d it justice. "Simple,bold, and nothing too fancy" i kept telling myself!

I spent a lot of time just looking at the roughs and trying to work which colours would go where and how i could make the best use of the stock colour. Also, composition was proving to be a bit of a headache as it just kept getting more complex.

In a bid to make the image a bit more simple i knocked up some mock 

featuring anatomy shots i did of my self, and get a better idea of 

the scale of the donut monster compared to the city.

The way i was setting out all my roughs in a box/frame made my mind wander onto the way the Obey Giant poster looks. It made me re-think of heavily cropping a simple looking image rather than using lots of elements and detail that might've got lost during the screen printing process. I then just played with the ideas of doing a cheeky 'rip' of Shepard Fairey design and slogan,which in itself is also a 'rip' of 80's sci-fi film 'They Live'. (see below)

Shepard Faireys iconic design.

Obey is now Dobey, featuring a reworked donut-faced Andre the Giant.

I pulled the sketches into illustrator and used the Fairey design as a rough template, adding my own touches to it, in order to created a drippy sprinkle covered donut man mess. The only original part of the design left was the eyes, and the altered type face. To give the impression of shades i got some halftones involved in the sprinkles, making it a bit more visually interesting, i guess. Also adding shine on the glaze by using slithers of white, which would hopefully make it look a bit less 'flat'. I realise depending on what part of the country you're from the whole "Do-Bey/Dobey" play on words might be a bit confusing. I hadn't totally thought it through, got carried away wight the visuals!

- TO THE PRINT ROOM -

Final result all framed, cheering my room up a bit!

I've discovered the screen printing process is a real roller coaster of emooootions! Due to some issues with my ink starting to dry up and stick to the screen, resulting in the black ink not printing at all well, it looked like the day was a right-off. Which was a shame as the pink layer had gone super smooth, and was really happy with how the colour had come out. Was a bit worried it might come out a bit pale, but alas, it could melt your eyeballs. But thanks to Lyndon (the print tech pro) he salvaged the black layer. It meant a fair bit of waiting around (after having to clean the screens and pull the black ink)and panicking as for some stupid reason,i'd only made 6 prints, but I'm pretty chuffed with the look of the final prints, imperfections 'n all! 

I know part of the brief was to incorporate aspect of the past visual language lessons (line of sight, composition, depth, tone, etc) but i also kept this part of the brief in mind;

Have fun

I did, mostly. The hardest part was the rough design stage.I felt i whole printing process sunk in a whole lot more compared to when we were screen printing in big groups. I went away feeling that when it comes to doing more screen printing in the future that i could handle it without as much guidance. I felt genuinely interested and buzzing about it all, and was already thinking about what i could do next.

Make the work you want to make

I totally did, which may have detracted from the brief somewhat. Although the design did involve frame, composition, tone to a point. My reasons for going down the graphic route was largely to see how i could produce crisp solid shapes and colour using analogue techniques.

If we'd be able to use more colours then i probably gone down the hand drawn monster donut route i started with - as it would given me a bit more to work with as far as the final composition went.

Say something

As far as saying something, i think it's mainly saying 'borrow from other borrowers, but put

your own take and tone onto it'.