Viewpoint, Depth and Line of Sight

For my fan art poster i chose to use The Blues Brothers to base my design on. It is a film from my childhood that I have always enjoyed. I wanted to include a number of the actors and musicians from the film in my design but make the blues brothers themselves the main focus of the poster. This presented a problem for me as it is difficult to fit in all the characters I want to without overcrowding the composition. I decided to sue vectors to make my poster in Adobe Illustrator as we have been working with it in other modules. I wanted to create cartoon versions of the characters from the film and decided to base them all on a template I created. I made alterations for each character to certain parts of the character like eyes and nose then added new components like hair and clothing almost like a construction line for characters. I selected 9 characters and decided to lay them out in a grid and try to use compositional techniques to focus attention on the main characters. 

 I used line of sight from all the other characters to try and draw attention to Jake and Elwood. with there being two main characters I wanted to highlight them both as equally as possible and even try to make them appear as a pair when not directly next to each other. I was helped out by the fact the characters wear very distinctive all black outfits that allowed me to make them stand out from the rest of the cast. I left both of the brother staring straight forward to interact more directly with the viewer than the other characters. I positioned the nun at the bottom centre of the image to combine with the two brothers to create an arrow pointing at the title of the film. I also think this makes the balances the composition in terms of colour. 

I added some texture to the piece using the opacity mask in Illustrator as the design to break up the solid vector shapes. I knew it was likely that in the process of screen printing I would come across some imperfections and texture but wanted to make sure there was a predetermined texture to the design. i thought about adding some black to the title of the poster but wanted to see how it would look with the lettering silhouetted. i didn't have time to make more screen so decided to stick with this design and make sure I mixed a dark enough blue that would to stop the print looking top heavy.

This is the screen set up for the first colour of the print. I had a few troubles drying printing with the ink drying in the screen preventing it from printing properly and towards the end of the process I managed to break the screen, luckily all three of us had a number of good prints by that point. it was difficult working in such close proximity with two other people and meant that if one of us had a problem we all had to stop which led to knock on effects for everyone.unfortunately on my second layer part of the design washed out and meant that the ray Charles character did not print clearly at all. I did like the distressed look but would like to have controlled it myself. I don't think it ruins the print overall.