Caio's Graduate Diploma

I stepped away from the “bootleg” inspirations for a while to investigate if I could develop an illustration style based on the “bad drawing” approach with the crooked lines and the colours leaking out of the outlines. I’ve had this drawing I made that I enjoy for years now:

I decided to expand on it and create a series in a similar fashion:

I wanted to keep all their faces the same, and I kinda realized these drawings are more about the clothing patterns than anything else. Still, though, I think the style looks quite nice, still not sure what I’m gonna do with them though.

As I’ve been doing frequently since project II, I used Illustrator’s blend commands to scramble the visual elements in them:

This is another process I’ve picked up which I think often looks pretty cool but am not sure what to apply it in. Here are the sheets of pure experiments with these effects that I’ve done:

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Thinking back to my sketchbook free drawings, which are often a seemingly random blend and distribution of objects and figures in space, almost a stream of consciousness, I went on to doodle on top of those characters. I realized that when doing it in the computer, and with the ability to undo, I’m generally more careful than when I do it in on paper:

From there I tried putting the illustration style into other applications. I imagined a set of modern “ambient prints” for a home (pictured specifically a living room and a kitchen), and ad illustrations for products and inspired by Warhol drew some household goods. Those are all common food products in Brazil:

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Looking from here I think I should have exaggerated more with the leaking colours and the carelessness. After drawing those, I went up to write and draw on top of them, sort of like a digital graffiti, reflecting on advertising and originality:

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I had a tutorial with Mariana and she showed me a few really interesting artists that have projects with very similar concepts to the ones I’m considering.

Germes Gang (instagram.com/germesgang) is a Portuguese street art collective that also engages with both the mass media subjects and the “bad drawing” style I’m studying:

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CMP Office (instagram.com/cmp_office) is an experimental fashion label that questions that uses appropriation and mash ups to create some interesting pieces:

Ricardo Passaporte’s (instagram.com/ricardopassaporte) process is similar to Madsaki’s in his appropriation of images and reproduction through sloppy spray painting to create beautiful pieces:

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Still on the vein of exploring my thought process coming from “bootleg design” and “poorly drawn”, I decided to experiment with a more illustration-based approach. So i drew Spider-Man:

I liked how it looked, so I went on to draw the rest of a series, once again on the “Avengres”:

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Once again I tried to be very sloppy with my drawing and coloring, and that time extended that to the writing of their names as well. In some of them I tried emulating the squished text you get on childrens’ drawn posters when they start writing a title with large letters and then have to make them smaller by the end when they realize they’re gonna run out of space (speaking from personal experience).

Also, I deliberately used characters that are not part of the Avengers for comical effect, and following through with the “bootleg” concept.

I then went on to do a similar experiment with the cast of Friends, another extremely popular TV show, along with other different Photoshop experiments:

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And I also tried a similar approach through drawings on MS Paint, a software renowned for being very basic and limited (I love the rough pixelated look of the brushstrokes in there):

Still trying to figure out other ways to adapt my concept into a possible personal style I’m trying to figure out if I have, I redrew other popular franchise characters in the style of the character I developed for my first project:

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I had some doodles in my sketchbook that I was thinking of making into sculptures since project 3, when we had a more object-oriented brief:

Since we were asked to be experimental and work with varying approaches we usually wouldn’t I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try this out.

I drew them while thinking of simple assemblages of everyday objects painted over to create creature-like sculptures/pieces of furniture. The idea was to have them be all white with colourful bits painted over, and maybe have several of them stacked in different ways, with varying objects on top, different forms painted over and bits added to, but of course, for now I’d aim to make just one.

Since I assumed this would be quite a complex process, even though the idea were fairly simple sculptures, I started thinking why I wanted to make them and what was the idea behind them. The idea of bringing drawings from my sketchbook into life is always present, but why this specific one to become a sculpture?

I figured that some of the concepts behind this particular piece so far were the creation of living things from everyday objects that surround me, almost a form of forced pareidolia, the encasing and unifying of seemingly unrelated objects through the use of white, the creation of alternative surfaces for painting on, and the elevation of simple, common objects, and even possibly rubbish, into art pieces through assemblage, juxtaposition and colour, and in a way, a study of simplicity and practicality, or what are the simplest, most easily available objects I could put together that would constitute a fairly interesting sculpture for me.

I had talked to Clare in the Design Museum about this idea and she suggested I should go to Cy Twombly’s sculpture exhibit in the Gagosian Gallery. After doing some research on his sculptures, I realized his use of the white colour to confer uniformity to different objects had a lot in common with what I had in mind:

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There are some pieces by sculptors such as David Cerny and Erwin Wurm in which I can see some of my own thinking as well, especially in regards to animating objects by attaching body parts to them, and doing so through a comical perspective:

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We had a lecture called “Epic Fail”, which was essentially about teaching us the value of “failure” in art and design practice as a method for making so that we can “fail better”, and direct that to a general idea of experimentation and risk taking.

As an exercise in the end of the lecture, we had to take a previous project of ours and make it fail. It was a bit hard for me because I had left my computer (where I have all my projects) at home for the day, and all I had in the RCA were a few prints from a project that had already failed. I set out to try to make it fail even harder, the prints I had were at least kinda cool looking so I tried collaging them into the ugliest piece I could. I went on to do this only a few minutes before we were supposed to present our failure so I had to rush. I cut my pieces semi randomly and used some ugly brown tape to stick them together. Not looking as sloppy as I wanted it to be I folded it into a paper plane. That’s around when the time was over:

Unfortunately, I think it ended up looking quite cool, and I didn’t have the foresight to make sure it at least wasn’t a flyable plane, so I guess I failed the task.

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One thing I noticed is that even when I was trying to make something look ugly, I was still overly clinical about it and couldn’t manage to not accidentally cling to some ideals of harmony while making it. Next time I should either let go and go for complete randomness or be very strict about not placing elements in the place I first think of. Failing is a lot harder when you actually try to, I should try to fail more.

I went on to do further experiments on the same vein of the previous ones with the appropriation of characters from television, but this time with some digital collage.

I used the Teletubbies this time around not only because they were one of my favourite shows as a child, but also because I do still appreciate the surreal, uncannily cheerful aesthetic of the show, and I think the fact that they are essentially television-creatures with screens on their bellies and antennae on their heads allows for some funny and interesting self-referential commentary.

This was the first image I created, basically testing out different ideas as I thought them, which I later used to develop more resolved pieces:

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The stencil look of those last ones makes me think they could work nicely as graffiti art. Oh, here’s a test sheet I used to experiment with the digital colouring method I used for them, which was inspired by Warhol’s prints, and other Photoshop effects:

I then went on to apply the same idea and style to the Hey Arnold! character:

Still studying the theme of Bootleg art and design, I found some artists that I thought were very relevant for the development of my research. After spending some time reading about established pop artists that were vital to drive the discussion of the relations between art and mass media forward, such as Warhol (celebrity, commodity products, mass production) and Lichtenstein (appropriation, decontextualization, elevation of “low” art) I went on to look at contemporary examples.

Eric Doeringer is an American artist that sets up pop up “bootleg art” shops outside of galleries selling his own reproductions of renowned artists’ pieces, cheekily marketing them for being cheaper than the originals:

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Madsaki is a Japanese painter who works under Takashi Murakami for Kaikai Kiki Gallery, he uses spray paint to trace over famous artworks and television characters, substituting their faces for smileys. He tries to get his paintings to look very “ghetto” in his own words, his lines are sloppy and the paint drips all over the canvas, his process is very simplistic. Still, his pieces have a very distinctive and recognizable look and he exposes and sells internationally, his work is more about the narrative behind the process and the juxtaposition than the technique and preciosity, which I find very inspiring:

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Researching Madsaki got me thinking about my digital drawings and illustrations, which I like to infuse with a similar deliberately sloppy style, so I went on to look up other artists for inspiration with a focus on how their work engages with digital art.

Julian Opie is a British contemporary pop artist who makes paintings, sculptures and installations, and was a very prominent figure in the New British Sculpture movement. His work has a very digital appearance, he uses solid, bold colors and thick uniform outlines, often drawing inspiration for passerby on the streets, and installing his works in a range of interesting ways that I think really explore the possible applications of digital art.

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Researching the theme I was working with, I went to look into a phenomenon I had already been interested in for a while: bootleg toys. Along with “art toys”, they’ve gained some heightened attention in the art world as of recently (I think).

According to some sources, the artist that started the bootleg toys trend is The Sucklord (suckadelic.com):

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Some other interesting artists are Pendragon (triangularboy.net/pendragon), Killer Bootlegs INC. (instagram.com/killerbootlegs) and Dollar Slice Bootlegs (instagram.com/dollar_slice_bootlegs).

Following on the work I’ve done with the pixelation effect for the previous visual experiments, I wanted to take it further and explore the possibilities of the effect. My friend asked if I had any “visuals”(ambient videos to be played to the songs) for a party she was throwing, so I decided that would be a perfect opportunity to further experiment with it.

I wanted to use very “ambient” footage (fireplaces, aquariums, walks through grassy fields) so I downloaded videos off Youtube through some sketchy websites. I experimented with a range of parameters from the Mosaic pixelation effect on Premiere, exploring the ambient background video relations and studying the boundaries of recognizability of the images, varying between making them recognizable, pixelated to a point beyond recognition, and anything in between. Along with the fact that the videos I had were unlicensed videos from Youtube, I thought of the quick experiment also as an exploration of themes related to censorship and concealment, thinking, for instance, of the moments when brand logos or people’s faces are hidden through pixelation on television for various reasons.

I made really long videos which are difficult to upload here, so here are some screen captures:

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They don’t really say much as the movement is a big point of the videos, but I thought some of the images I got turned out really nice, I think this can become something interesting.

Inspired by the “Harry Potter Obama Sonic” backpack I went on to experiment creating my own “bootleg prints” with popular characters from television:

I chose the Avengers because they’re one of the most popular cinema franchises today, exactly the type of characters that I’d expect to produce a lot of interesting knock-offs. I tried colouring them as if I was someone that had never really seem them before, trying to colour from intuition, while deliberately adding on some wacky details and making some bits purposefully ugly. I tried to be as sloppy as possible about it, using inharmonious colours, and sometimes just straight up getting everything wrong (Thor’s beard).

I also decided to use the Comic Sans font since it’s very overused and just a big no-no in the design community, misspell the name “Avengres” and add an off-putting outer glow effect around it. I also used the registered trademark symbol ironically, I think maybe it can be an unifying element in my different designs if this ends up being the direction I go with.

For this one I experimented with misnaming the franchise, the illustration are actually Digimon, not Pokemon (a plausible mistake), I coloured them wrong similarly to the previous one, and tried out pixelation effects to emulate the unlicensed use of low quality images found on the internet. I also stretched the title, distorting it vertically, a fairly common mistake often done by amateur designers.

For this one I did some colouring work and misspelled name similar to the previous examples, but tried to go a bit crazier with the image stretching. I should go even further with it next time.