Screen Print Book; Initial Ideas & Refinement

       

Initial colour swatches, sketches and layout of hotdog book

Once our group had seen the swamp like remains of Emily and Ambers camomile tea, our minds began to wander in all sorts of abstract directions. Suddenly our experiential research took on a new form; we were taking our mundane experiences and transforming them into something new and imagined. The thought of a swamp in a library soon turned to the idea of a library in a swamp. And a swamp inside a teapot. This whole world we'd experienced condensed into the refined space of a teapot, but what story was there to be told? We began incorporating the elderly people around us, in particular one old man that had caught our eye. Mix that with the strange dog statues we'd seen along the banisters and it soon became a surreal telling of our own experiences whilst in the library. A mixture of experience and imagination, our hotdog book became about telling the story of an elderly man and his dog falling into a teapot, finding a swamp library, and attempting to find their way out.

Written out points for presentation 

After the visit and first thoughts we had to present our findings to everyone else in the class. It became apparent quite quickly that our idea was a lot more complex than everyone elses. It was more abstract and we found that while we liked the wacky quirkiness of it, it was hard for other people to understand the story without it being talked through by one of our group members. This lead to a sit down and talk about simplifying the story and layout to make it more accessible to readers who had not had the same experience we did.

  

Re-do of story (simplified) 

We decided to refine the layout and story to make it easier to follow and understand. We chose to still have the book read from back to front so it seemed like you were climbing a staircase within the teapot much like the character in the story. We felt as though this simplified version still kept the quirkiness of the initial idea but made it much more readable and understandable to other people.

 

Final refinements of layout of my panel alongside colour experiments and texture/media experiments for final transfer. Completed image in colour on tracing paper ready to be transferred into printing paper by hand, ready to be exposed onto screen

Once the final layout and storyboard had been decided upon we divided up the pages and began to work on them with our own stylistics. We had chosen a colour scheme so after a few colour trials it became about the texture of the media as well as the final colour. After all of his was refined it was ready to be traced onto a sheet ready to expose onto the screen.