Voices
This piece was done on
deep red paper with Dr. Ph. Martins bleedproof white.
Inspired by the wisdom and courage of Malala Yousafzai
and wanting to inspire my two daughters, I created this
piece with large letters and a bold layout. I sketched
the design on grid paper, with several revisions, before
scanning it into the computer for resizing. I was happy
with the design of each word, but their placement wasn’t
quite right. On the screen, I was able to move the words
around to get a final draft. From there, I printed the
sketch to use to transfer guidelines to the red paper.
As I worked on the
letters, I noticed that the white wasn’t as opaque as I
wanted, so I went back and added a second coat of paint
with a small watercolor brush. |
And then… I managed to drop my brush onto the table! It
fell in the middle of the word “tell” and rolled through
the G in girls, and the C below it. I tried all of the
traditional ways of correcting mistakes, but the paper
just wasn’t having it. So, I dug through all my red
paint and managed to make an acrylic one that matched
(using a scrap of red paper to test). I carefully
painted over the white smears of ink and repaired it.
During class, Reggie commented on the design and
suggested that I scan the piece and shrink it to a
smaller size. In doing that, I realized that the texture
of the paper looked unclean after scanning. So, I traced
the whole text to a vector in Adobe Illustrator and
replaced the background with a solid red color. After
printing these in 8x10 and 5x7, I was really encouraged
by how successfully the design translated to the smaller
size. And, now that I have it in a vector format, I am
able to experiment with different colors of letters and
backgrounds very easily. |
