Beginning: Riley Deck

Deck design No. 2: Riley

Not sure where this one came from, but I'm actually really excited about it. Kind of a desert/ palm tree vibe going on. I'm taking my first road trip out west soon (crazy excited about it), so maybe I was subconsciously thinking there. But I'm thinking color in this one and I'm stoked about it. 

Anyway, this is the original sketch I came up with. I have found that I really enjoy finding my letters in the line work. I don't take exactly what I get from the line work, but it definitely helps in finding an interesting style for the text. 

Riley text

And this is the sketch on the board. Sorry if you can't see the pencil marks, but maybe it'll give an idea of what I'm trying to do. I think I want to pick up some spray paint and stencil out the images and block out the color. Then after filling the color, I'll either go in with a brush or paint pen and add in smaller details. 

I think I want spray paint that has some kind of shine after it dries. That way the shine of the image and the rawness of the wood will work together, maybe level one another out. 

Apple Landscape (drawing)

This is suppose to look as though it is a landscape, with an apple as the land... Not sure what I think about it though. The figures are suppose to look as though they are sinking into the space, however, I don't fully think it give it that feel. And then the background is full of text relating to the idea.

Materials: Marker, pen, whiteout, and watercolor wash

Text as Images

So here are some of my works using text... 

The image on the right says Kwashiorkor and in the background it is filled with text about the disease. It is most common in children who suffer from malnutrition. The images of the children in poverty with the potbellies are images of children who suffer from Kwashiorkor.

The image on the right says Child Labor, behind the image is text about the diamond industry. There is a large amount of children and adults who are forced to work within the diamond mining campus. They are given no education and forced to work for less than a dollar day.

The very bottom image was pulled from a previous work with the words Russia, 5 million, Famine, and Drought. It was inspired from reading I did about the Russian Famine in 1921.

 

Text

The text I found from those lines are where these words came from. I took the same words with the same lines and then adjusted them to the paper I was using. Just playing around with my options about where I want to to go with this work.

Russian Famine of 1921

I was recently reading about the Russian Famine of 1921 and this idea came about. In the simplest explanation the Russian famine was caused by a drought in the 1920's and roughly 5 million people died.

The top image is a map of Russia, clearly not a perfect map but it was drawn from a map of Russia. Then I took a a sheet of tracing paper and drew the image of below on the left. It was this idea of the weighted atmosphere swarming the land (a.k.a. the famine). Within those lines I then found my figures, drawn on another piece of tracing paper. People who were forced to adjust to the circumstances and were affected by it. The next row down and first image on the left is another sheet of tracing paper. On that sheet, I found text within those lines. The words I found were 5 million, famine, Russia, and drought. And lastly, I took another sheet of tracing paper and over laid it on again and designed one final image, influenced by all the other layers.

Materials: paper, tracing paper, pen

Hunger

Just finished this one today. Sorry its kind of blurry, I only have my phone. I kind of messed up some in a couple spots, but for the most part I'm rather pleased with it. I've never done a piece with text as the background.

The background is made up of terms and their definitions. They all revolve around the issues of hunger. And then ends with a fact about hunger.

Terms:
Hunger, Starvation, Famine, Poverty, Malnutrition, Anemia, Kwashiorkor, Catabolism, Beriberi, Pellagra, Scurvy, Atrophy, Dehydration, Fatigue, Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme, International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Fact: Roughly, 25,000 people die every day of hunger.