Workshop 1 - Rhyming Slang Task

Research

Dan Hillier

This is a perfect example of what i'd like to with accomplish with my final piece a mix of juxtapositioning and victorian art.
http://www.danhillier.com/#/?image_id=ae_01

Gemma Robinson

I like the simplicity of these images, making them really easy to read and understand, this is what my final poster image needs to be.
http://www.gemma-robinson.co.uk/newwork.htm

Steve Edge

This is the sort of style I want for my work for it looks like an old London poster you'd see in Victorian Britain. 

http://www.steve-edgeshop.com/shop/posters/cockney-rhyming-slang-poster/

First when we were given the brief I looked at the cockney alphabet we were given. The first thing that jumped out at me, it’s illustrative qualities, was Cat and Mouse – House. I wanted to make it that the cat made up the main part of the house and the mouse is the door, like the cat is looming over the mouse forebodingly because it’s about the pounce. This idea wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be, for it was hard to make the shape of the cat still look like a house. The next rhyme that caught my eye was Jackdaw – Jaw, which made me think of the pedigree chum ‘dentastixs’ with dogs with oversized human teeth which is not only funny but makes it very obvious in the image what they’re trying to mock-sell.

 For my illustration I sketched out an idea of what I wanted the image to look like; to keep the image quite simple so as to make the teeth really obvious, I illustrated the Jackdaw as a silhouette and filled it in with cross hatching to make it look interesting shadowy and still slightly feathery looking then gave it big teeth which I kept starkly white. I then asked people what they thought and they said that this one was the strongest/clearest image, out of the selection I’d drawn, to read so I then upped the scale and redrew the Jackdaw to A2 and also added typography around the body, the text was inspired by the Chat Noir poster which I thought the Jackdaw sort of reminded me of.

 I then took this image to the photocopier and experimented with some colour in the background though this turned out to be more difficult then I first thought, for I still wanted to keep the teeth quite starkly white which is difficult to do then adding multiple layers of colour. In the end I made something that sort of worked though I was still not happy with it as a finished piece so I scanned it into Photoshop and cleaned it up and experimented again with background colours thinking more about what would it be like if it was an old poster. In the end I came up with something that looks worn, seedy and slightly sinister. I thought then, what would it be a poster for? Then I thought what if it’s the poster for a toothpaste, so I made mock up of what the tooth paste would look like.