My haiku:
“A Poppy Blooms” by Katsushika Hokusai
I write, erase, rewrite
Erase again, and then
A poppy blooms.
For my first poster I was prompted in class to choose three key themes from my haiku, and then expand upon these themes by creating iterative sketches, three for each theme, nine altogether. Finally we had to choose one of the sketches and refine it, taking it from a sketch to a poster. This composition could only contain black and white geometric shapes, and had to use the principle of repetition. The three key themes I chose for my haiku were: change, creation, and beauty. With the sketch I chose to refine coming from the key theme of “change”.
Some of my initial sketches for poster 1
After choosing this theme, I then recreated this sketch on adobe Photoshop, expanding upon it and increasing its size to better fit the 40cm by 40cm poster requirement. My chosen composition was inspired by the lunar cycle, starting out at a full moon and moving towards a new moon, because of this I chose to use circles as my simple geometric shape.
Due to the poster revolving around the principle of repetition, I decided to have this change happen at the very end of my poster, so that the full moon could be the repeating factor. I chose to keep the circles static, as opposed to active/dynamic to better focus the viewer's attention that change is occurring, and is the main theme of the poster. In my opinion it also better showed the repetition of the circles as well. I also chose to have the circles go diagonally across the page, rather than horizontally, in order to include more circles, further showing that my composition uses repetition, it also fills up more space on the poster.
Poster designed in Photoshop
Poster in the process of being drawn
After designing the poster on Photoshop, I then started to draw out the circles on paper, unfortunately due the Covid-19 lock down, I left my 40cm by 40cm poster in my dorm room and was unable to get another piece of paper that large. In order to meet the requirement of having a poster that size, I was forced to glue two pieces of regular A4 paper together, and then cut them down to size. This unfortunately left a large seem down the middle of my page where the two papers were glued. To create the circles on the page I used a compass, first in pencil, then tracing over the circle with a sharpie. The size of my circles was 4cm in diameter, with the distance between them also being 4cm. To color the circles I originally used black crayon, however after running out of the crayon, I did use Photoshop to color in the rest.
Final design:
Final poster 1 design