It happened on this day revealed
Now that the deadline has passed I can finally reveal what I chose to do for my ISTD project. The brief i chose was It happened on this day and I decided to do the 23rd September 2009 when Sydney was hit by a giant dust storm. Perfect conditions in the outback whirled up the worst dust storm Sydney had seen in over 70 years. I chose to do this day as I initially wanted to do something on strange phenomena. I’m a big fan of Sydney anyway (not that ive ever been) and so saw a perfect opportunity to work on a project that would keep me excited throughout.
When starting to look into the background of the day what I found to be most interesting was what people thought was going on when they woke up, from really extreme thoughts like they thought there eyes were bleeding to slightly more rational ones like thinking there was a bushfire. My initial ideas were to literally show these quotes from extreme to less extreme as the days do on and visually show the dust storm from dark red through to orange to a cream colour when it finally started to dissipate.
As I developed my ideas further I stumbled upon the possibility of using acetate as a way of layering up people’s fears so that they became chaotic. I had never worked with acetate before and I soon realized that I needed to buy a special kind of printing acetate if I wanted to use my own printer unless I wanted to screen print it. The special version is textured on one side so that the ink is able to grab onto something. However the mistakes I had when learning this lead me to a type experimentation that I went onto use in my final. I printed on the wrong side of acetate then placed this on plain paper so it printed the ink which I then scanned into the computer. It gave me a really nice textured grainy print like dust had mixed with moisture and collected on a surface, which was perfect for my subject.
I also looked into paper marbling as I wanted to get across the colours from the day and ingulf the viewer in colour and type trying to get across how they might have felt. I really enjoyed doing this, getting my hands dirty again reminiscent of the last project. I think I get excited about things when im not sure how they’re going to turn out – there’s nothing better than unveiling something that’s unique.
I will keep my final outcome for another post so keep a watch out.
