Staedtler

One of the earliest bits of stationery I ever remember using, was a black and yellow Noris pencil by Staedtler in primary school- which is a memory I probably share with a lot of people. This pencil, was, and still is found in the school pencil pots and pencil cases of many a child and student, to this very day. 

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From the Noris pencil to Staedtler’s ergosoft colouring pencils, triplus fineliners, ballpoint pens and Mars plastic erasers, Staedtler is a stationery brand that has been with me (or rather in my pencil case) for most of my life. Having used it for so long- up until now and during school, I know to expect a certain quality in it’s products. As a lover of stationery, that makes them great to use. I know it’s products will work well and last a long time, and it’s one of the reason I pick them up, even for my younger brother in just starting secondary school.

One of the best things I liked about Staedtler when I was at school, was the cases the pencils and fineliners came in. It made them really easy to carry around, and helped keep everything in one place- which is important when you’re a student, and it feels like you’re carrying around about half of your worldly possessions in your bag. The pencils also came with a white protective coating around the lead, which helped prevent breakage and made them last even longer- I’ve had my own set for quite a few years.

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Though some products of Staedtler’s I use more than others these days, their Mars plastic eraser is one I’ll probably continue to buy for years to come, as it’s one of the best ones I’ve personally used. 

For an introductory task to Level 5 and our first module, we were asked to talk about 5 retail or product brands that we are loyal to. 

My first brand is Sony.

Over the years, I’ve grown up with Sony products. Whether that’s our early Vaio family laptops to pairs of earphones, video players, PSP’s, PlayStations, and every mobile phone I’ve ever had (from a Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot to my current Sony Xperia X), it’s a brand that’s always been a constant in terms of technology. 

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It’s a brand I know because of my dad owning products from it, before I was even born- from a Walkman, to cameras and camcorders. It’s one I’ve grown to love and buy from myself. I know it as a brand that creates products that are reliable, long lasting and well designed. Because I’ve been surrounded by Sony in one form or another for so long, that I’m familiar with it and enjoy using it’s products, means they’re something I’ll always continue to buy.

The products I own by Sony are quite clean and simple in terms of design, and that’s what I like most about them. From the Sony logo itself, to the user interfaces of their products, and the finishes of the materials used (from glass backs on the phones, to brushed metal), they’re easy to use, and also to look at. 

When your work has a story, it leaves an impression. It adds meaning to your design, and makes it memorable. 

In this lecture, we also looked at stories from a scientific perspective, and how they’re ingrained in us. When I studied psychology, we looked at models of memory and theories of forgetting. One of the things that involved was contextual cues/ sensory cues. We learnt that if something was present at the time we learnt something, we have a better chance of recalling it if it is also present. For example, If you sat at home revising for an exam with your music on, and you sit said exam without the music on, you might have less of a chance of recalling what you learnt, because something you associating with taking in that information isn’t present. In this lecture, we looked at how these cues/ stimuli, help us build ‘narratives’ around things we experience such as taste and smell.

As modern storyteller Ian Douglas says, storytelling can connect people, if we allow it to.

The way you tell as story affects someones engagement with it. The colours you use, the mood you set- influences what they’ll take away from it. Use the wrong font and your audience might not see what you want them to see.

When presenting an idea to a client, mood boards are a good way to set the tone for what you’re going for. They bring together different elements, and allow the client to see how the ‘story’ would play out. It allows them to see the early stages and pick out what they might want to change.

‘Illustrations can be used to embellish the text’. Colour palettes can be used to make a further statement. Consistency can also be used to say something- aesthetics/ style/ appearance/ composition.

Annie Atkins is a graphic designer who creates props for films. A lot of her work doesn’t often get seen, it’s little details like an aged post card or piece of documentation, it’s newspaper clippings in the background, and signage. ‘It helps actors [and the audience] to get transported into the time.’ In and interview with her that we saw, she said she tries to replicate the process used to create the props in order to get an authentic feel. For example if something was written by hand, she’d do that rather than find a font. If something was aged, she’d manually try to age it over digitally. 

‘Brand stories are stories of identity, who we are and where we come from.’ Jane showed us one of her own branding projects and it was really interesting to see how she had multiple different approaches based on the audience/ market it was aimed at. ‘When designing for brands, really gain an understanding of the client and their stories, and try to find a story within those’. ‘Be aware of competitor brands and points of difference. Do your research properly, it really shows up some interesting thing.’ 

This lecture was about interpretation and perception. It touched upon a concept I learnt about when I studied psychology at college; schemas. Schemas are like folders in your mind, containing knowledge on different subjects. So when you come across something new, you interpret and try to understand it with that existing knowledge/ information already in your mind. Everyone’s schemas will be full of different things, based on what they know, therefore, our interpretations will also differentiate. We will encode and decode something differently based on what we already know of it. It’s like semiotics and associations, the knowledge that we have, what symbols already mean to us. 

We looked at what narratives and stories are; stories can be seen as a sequence, whereas narratives are more what’s happening within those stories/ sequences. 

‘Narratives are an open connection of moments, stories are a closed narrative structure.’

Thoughts

Experimenting and allowing yourself to explore new technologies, allows you to feed what you’ve learnt into your own ways of thinking, and develop yourself further. As times are changing, so is the desire for everything to be solely static. In this day and age, you will likely have to factor in the shift from static to moving. You have to consider how the branding you’ve designed would move and interact, what sort of narrative you’re applying.

Branding for example, doesn’t just serve the purpose of showing you a name. It often represents a lifestyle, a story, a conscious choice, it has to mean something to a certain audience. So that narrative is everything, and has to be carefully considered, whether or not what you’ve created moves. Brands tell stories. Different stories to different people. Movement is often used to enhance the story, to create further engagement through expression.

‘It’s important alongside commercial work to have your own work too.’

‘It’s important to embrace new technology and tools, to adapt and try new things, as well as continuing to enjoy the old.’

Multiple narratives can be woven together, building layers so you see something new each time you look at something. 

We also looked at the Channel 4 logo, and how the identity has evolved and moved with the times over the years. Initial incorporation of a motion aspect, influenced how the identity gradually formed and grew. ‘The simplicity contains the real power’. Channel 4′s identity is a great example of merging film, motion and design. It used the logo and broke it down, turning it into something new each time. You can use the foundations that already exist, interpret them in a way that hasn’t been done before. Narrative is telling a story in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Working with sound can also add to a narrative. Just listen to something with the volume off to see how much it changes what is being communicated. Sound can inform mood, which in turn can inform, create, or further a narrative. It can create a whole new story in itself.

We also looked at title sequences and how they can set the tone for a movie. Catch Me If You Can (2002) is a great example.

Thoughts

During the first bookbinding workshop I went to, we were shown how to make four different kinds of books; a saddle stitch book (the white, open book in the picture above), an accordion fold book (the purple and orange zigzag shaped one), a Turkish map fold book (the open green diamond-y shape one), and finally, a Japanese stab bind book (the closed pale orange one).

Saddle stitch books = good for double sided pieces.

Accordion fold books = good for zines/ continuous drawings/ stories.

Turkish map fold = the most ornamental of the books we looked at, and in my opinion, too decorative/ complex to work for what I want to do. 

Japanese stab bind = good for single pieces. This and the accordion fold book were the ones I liked the most from this workshop, and I liked how ‘delicate’ it seemed in it’s simplicity.

Naomi referred us to www.beccamakingfaces.com to find the instructions for this and many other bookbinding methods. 

Thoughts/ reflection:

Whilst I liked all of the books we made during the workshop, I couldn’t find one I liked the format of enough choose for my own. Around the print room, Naomi had a few other examples of other books she’s made, and one of them she’d shown me a few weeks before, was a clamshell book, which was effectively a box with the appearance of a hardcover book, used to display things inside (such as another book, or prints for example).

When I began this project, one of the things I initially struggled with for a long time, was how to interpret my story. At the beginning, before I’d chosen which of the short stories from The Illustrated Man I was going to do, I wasn’t sure how I was going to bring things together sequentially. At that time, I had the idea of doing a series of prints/ pieces, looking at different parts of the various stories- and then presenting them together in some way. Once I’d decided on Kaleidoscope as my chosen story, I knew I’d be looking at different parts of the story, and to show them together as a little series, still seemed like the most appropriate thing to me. I liked the idea of having them tucked away inside something, and to me, for my book/ story to have the appearance of a book on the outside, but remain in separate little pieces on the inside, seemed really fitting as I’d be looking a different parts/ pieces of the story.

Clamshell book box: design & making

I booked another workshop with Naomi to make the clamshell book, and you can see the pictures in reverse above. It took several hours to create the book- and that was before gluing the ‘box’ pieces to the base, as it needed to be kept unattached to be able to screen print on. All of the pieces of the book were made from the same card/ board material, and joined together using PVA glue. The various sections were coated with PVA glue, and then covered with book cloth, then similarly glued together. It was quite a lengthy process and there were some imperfections, but overall I was happy with the results.

Brainstorming and trying things out for Kaleidoscope. 

For the mini task that was set over Easter, I decided to experiment with some mark making techniques, that I could make use of in collage. I experimented with paper marbling, brusho, bubblewrap, ink, as well as felt tips. The least successful was the paper marbling, which kept turning out really muddy/ not combining well, and I also decided not to make use of it in any collage bits because I think due to the inks being oil based, they never seemed to fully dry- which means they could end up transferring. I think the brusho as well as the dry ink marks, could work well for collaging things like planets or comets. Below are some examples.

Here is some lino printing inspiration, from artists I've found mainly through instagram. This is just to give me an idea of the sort of marks I could make with lino, and the different ways people can add bits of detail.

Featured artists:

Derrick Castle (@strawcastle on instagram): [Source]

Ben Parsons (@ben_prints on instagram): [Source]

Kathleen Neeley (@kathleep on instagram): [Source]

Sue van Gageldonk (@suevangageldonk on instagram): [Source]

Scifi comic book illustration merges both the style I would like to take inspiration from, and the theme/ genre for my book and story. I think there’s a lot of character in these sorts of illustrations and they’re always so vibrant and colourful, so you really get a sense of the sort of action going on/ happening.  I feel like a lot of these illustrations would work well with lino, because of the way they use silhouettes/ outlines and their colour palettes. I like the way colour is used to illuminate or darken different elements, and I think something worth trying is substituting flat blocks of colour for collage, or to use it to add in details. 

Here are some examples of work by Jack Kirby (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1976) and Juan Gimenez (I believe).

[Sources: 1, 2]

Whilst not always in the comic book style, a great reference point for scifi illustration is the instagram account @scifi_art by Martin Kennedy. Filled largely with illustrations from books and book and magazine covers, it's an incredibly diverse collection of art, and showcases a range of things from scenes of planets and space to rockets, robots and extra- terrestrials. I'm a big fan of the feeling of scifi artwork, and I'd like to capture that or create something that remains as consistent, in my own work. I would also like to draw influence from the composition of these sorts of pieces in the things I'll create myself.

Here is an example of illustration (in this case, by Barclay Shaw) featured on Martin Kennedy’s instagram account:

Style inspiration

Andrew Fairclough of Kindred Studio, is a contemporary practitioner who works predominantly in this style. Whilst Roy Lichtenstein worked mainly with paint and stencils, a lot of Andrew's work is digitally created, with textures created manually and then used digitally to distress.

Working with textures is not really something I've done in the past, and whilst I plan to use manual techniques in this project, I am considering creating the cover for my book digitally (but creating textures is something I might try out- so it doesn't come across as too clean cut).

A lot of Andrew Fairclough's work has a scifi/ space theme running through it and I think it's a great reference point for this style of illustration. I don't plan to use as fine lines as used in his illustrations, but I'll look more at that in my post covering the lino printing artists I've looked at.

Style inspiration

Limited colour palettes, combined frequently with Benday* dot details, make Roy Lichtenstein's comic book style pop art illustrations really effective. This style of illustration combines simple elements in order to create expressive, striking images.

*Benday dots are different to halftone I learnt, as halftone dots vary in size, whilst these remain equal throughout the area in which they're used.

I aim to try to incorporate some kind of 'texture' in my lino printing, whether that's by the marks I make themselves, or by printing onto collages/ using collage to embellish.

Following the riso workshop I went to at Rope Press I decided that I wanted to take inspiration from pop art/ comic book illustration, because after using a few pieces like this in my collages, I thought that this style of illustration would work well with lino (because of how it utilises different line weights in illustrations, and 'outline's' things).

Today I went to a Risograph printing workshop at Rope Press (a riso printing company here in Birmingham). We created collages from a collection of things such as old magazines, comics and photographs. First, we created a collage to do a one colour print (green) and then a two colour one (orange and purple). What I learnt from this workshop is how you can use different colours to produce varying shades in a print, and that digitally, you work in layers- similarly to the process of setting up a file for screen printing. 

‘They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices- all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.’

I can imagine this line as the astronauts names woven together- scribbles overlapping, changing shape and disintegrating into nothing. Motion, chaos, confusion, space.

‘But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.’

‘A period...’ ‘...elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took it’s place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, in a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.’

‘It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.’

‘The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had bought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.’

‘Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.’

I feel like describes both their situation and how they must feel like drifting in space, really well.

‘...the other men chatted.’ ‘On and on; while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.’

‘It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the centre of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.’

’That isn’t important.’ said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of a bright film, an instant on the screen, all of it’s prejudices and passions condensed ad illuminated for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.'

'Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?’

'I'm not jealous of you any more, because it's as over for you as it is for me, and right now it's like it never was.'

'When anything's over, it's just like it never happened. Where's you life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?'

'Yes, it's better!'

'How?'

'Because I got my thoughts, I remember!' cried Lespere,'

'Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He only had dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.'

'But aren't we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing's over, it's done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other- and aura, a mysterious element.'

'They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety,'

''I've got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.'

'Meteors?'

'I think it's the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth every five years. I'm right in the middle. It's like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colours and shapes and sizes. God, it's beautiful, all that metal.'

Silence.

'I'm going with them.' said Stone. 'They're taking me off with them. I'll be damned.' He laughed.

Hollis looked to see but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphire and emerald mists and velvet inks of space,'

I like this line because it helps you imagine how the astronauts must be in space- all of them falling in different directions, surrounded by explosions of colour, weaving through such a vast, 'empty' space.

'There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the Meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet's Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colours when you were a child and held the tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

'So long, Hollis,' Stone's voice, very faint now. 'So long.'

'Good luck,' shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

'Don't be funny,' said Stone, and was gone.

'Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space.'

'The many good-byes. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart.'

'And as the body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.'

'Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body,'

'They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes'

'There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor storm, there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.'

The line above is my favourite from the story. To me (and together with the lines on the same page just before it) I think it represents the relationship of the astronauts to each other so well. It shows how they worked together and what they meant to each other. It compares them to systems ceasing to function- no longer having meaning- when such vital components are missing. It captures the essence of these men's relationships, and what it means now that they're separated in death.

'When I hit the atmosphere, I'll burn like a meteor. 'I wonder,' he said, 'if anyone'll see me?'

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed . 'Look, Mom, look! A falling star!'

The blazing white start fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois.

'Make a wish,' said his mother. 'Make a wish.'

Things to remember/ know when you’re doing wooden letterpress:

Don’t press too hard to ink up the plates (but make sure you ink them sufficiently to ensure a good print).

When doing a gradient, place your colours together in a line on a plate/ surface, and keep rolling until you get a smooth blend. Remember to lift up your roller as you roll, so it’s surface is fully coated (which won’t happen if you do a continuous roll without lifting).

The first print is always a tester.

You have to re-ink with every printing.

The lay gauge tells you where the paper is and the gripper holds them in place.

Roll the cylinder until it clicks.

When you tidy up letterpress, you do it with a sponge and water while it’s still locked up.

The pieces around the type are called furniture, and you use as many as you need to make sure it’s secured in place on all sides.

You can also lasercut your own type, and work with patterns.

In this workshop, I chose to letterpress a quote from the end of my chosen short story, Kaleidoscope. The quote was “Look! A falling star!” and the first print I did was in a dark blue colour to- reflect the night sky, and then in the next, I sprinkled talc (by lightly tapping the underside of the bottle over the type) to give it the effect of stars. I repeated this process with a blue and black gradient, as well as a pink and orange one- to reflect a blazing sky/ stars.

Reflection: