#todeath

“To Death With A Smile”

The brief asked to create a 2D poster output that showed  “a personal consideration or approach, the meaning In your own culture, how we fear, celebrate or deal with death”.

I am a person who is extremely scared of Death, nonetheless if I look back at my life I see how many times I went very close to it: the car crash, that time skiing, the moped crash, the bike crash, the fight in which I got my nose broken, even just yesterday when I fell in the shower, the list could be very long.

Every time I got close to her, but didn’t meet her, my first adrenaline-inducted reaction has always been smiling, laughing.

I think this relationship with Death will follow throughout my whole life: every day I don’t wake up ill with a deadly disease, every day I ride my bike without crashing into a lorry, every rooftop I climb without falling is a victory for me.

I researched images of grim reapers as I wanted a very scary rapresentation of Death, I did my research mainly on how is portrayed in the graphics of music genres such as grindcore, black metal, death and doom metal, hc punk.

As I wanted to highlight the fact that this relationship will continue for all my life, I decided to research how death is portrayed in tattoos.

I then remembered that I had took a photo months before of a grim reaper tattoo I really liked on a strangers leg. I decided to redraw it as use it as main illustration for the poster.

For the type I decided to have a classical serif font and to work on it so that it would look like an engraved epitaph on a grave, without being too literal and actually design a grave stone.

I will probably use this poster in a zine dedicated to my injuries and broken bones I’ve been preparing for a while.