Part 4: Exercise - Museum Poster

Visited the beachside Fish hoek Valley Museum - anonymous painting of the San people, the first signs of civilization in the valley. For use as reference maybe for the adult post idea?

An Irma Stern painting above from her home/museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Exaggerated facial features. Distorted proportions.

Irma Stern's painting with vibrant colours and  bold, dark outlined brush strokes.

Visited artist Irma Stern's old home/museum. Interesting Congalese decorative masks in her collection. Facial expressions are very distorted.

KIDS interest:San people/bushmen hunting display at the Fish Hoek Valley Museum above.

Adult interest: whalebone found on Fish Hoek beach

Teen interest: British colonialist outfit in Fish Hoek in the 1800s

I visited the Fish Hoek Valley Museum that features historical collections of random items from the area up to three hundred years ago. I found the San people/bushmen to be visually interesting and so have added them here. I feel that a collection of pictures treated in the same way with different objects will work best. It is challenging to decide how to appeal to each audience without placing any text on the museum pictures at all.

I want to use colour as a common thread to all three pictures to indicate that they apply to the same musuem.

Thumbnail sketches: I found out very quickly that I'd need to keep it simple, clear and concise to appeal to viewers from a distance. 

I had wanted to explore the bushman idea but realised that the level of detail and thought needed from the viewer to make sense of the picture was too difficult.

I decided to focus on the masks that I'd photographed in Irma Stern's Museum. I found a way to appeal to each audience through emotion on the masks faces and got this idea from Irma Stern's paintings which are very distorted.

Kids - round shapes, happy colours with orange, clownish 

Adults - cross, confused face, blue is reticent.

Teens - joker face which I would do in yellow

I interpreted these masks and made them my own. They were originally used as tribal dance masks in the Congo to call spiritual ancestors. Quite a different look and feel from my depiction in the posters.

Here I decided to use colour to depict emotion but decided the red was too overpowering and spoke louder than the poster design could communicate.

I used acryclic and then tried oil pastel and left it at that

I quite liked the utilitarian scribble of the oil pastel. I think it conveys 'art' or 'creativity' for the purpose of conveying the art theme available for show in a museum.

I decided on a repeat pattern on top of each drawing to create uniformity. This pattern adds detail to an otherwise stylised drawing with block colour. It is also reminiscent of African decorative patterns.

Original thumbnails of an idea that I abandoned in favour of drawing masks.

I thought perhaps the oddity of this vintage outfit might be attractive for teenagers but I don't think it works as a drawing.

My sketch of a mask in pen

Experimenting with colour - paint and oil pastels

A drawing for kids with round organic cheeks and a smiley face.

An idea for teens with a big expressive mouth, I drew this with the intention of adding to it with colour

I added orange for an approachable, non-threatening feeling and felt it was important to add detail to the drawing in the form of an African tribal pattern above. These are patterns that need no introduction in South Africa and are intuitively recognised as tribal designs.

I added yellow for a jovial feel, and the earings signify the search for identity and rebellion in teenage years that I hoped would draw interest from that age group through identification,

This stern, adult expression with its cool blue is definitely a more adult way to depict masks. I kept all the drawings a bit edgy and rough/messy, purposefully as I think the exaggerated expressions and blocklike forms can handle it and it offsets the blandness and 'bigness' of the space.

TYPOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS

After my tutor assessed this exercise: I added the chunky font I'd envisioned originally which adds balance and structure to the drawings and draws them together as a set. I superimposed the colour screens in InDesign. I'm not sure they work as they do lose the authentic hand coloured lines a bit and their energy seems less. On the other hand they do appear more 'finished'. The drawings really need to stand on their own.

Further experimentation: In response to my tutor's notes about experimentation I've taken some influence from the destructive Dadaism movement, I think this poster could be pushed into a more creative space in a similar realm to Dada art. Here I have chopped up one of the pieces to create something different from torn up collage.

Raoul Haussman's 'The Art Critic' Source: www.tate.org.uk [Accessed 12 June 2016]

Tore up my original image and pieced it together to  form a new but very distorted face, friendly, but new. I added coloured yellow card to the background and the words kids and fun in different typefaces where the word 'fun' looks a bit like a hand drawn font. I added a vertical pattern in felt tip pen. The Dada artist I looked at, Raoul Haussman used a collection of images to make a podium which show us something about his audience. I haven't set out to achieve this, but wanted to make children look twice and wonder what is going on. 

I added a colour background and typography in InDesign to get a final poster. It was a real challenge to get the face looking friendly enough to appeal to children. I am not sure this works for kids as it might be a bit odd. My solution was to add the words kids and fun and the bright fuschia pink colour. I chose the MUSEUM font for its naive slant and casual style.