In this exercise you can use any images created elsewhere in the course, to print onto the paper samples you collected earlier.
Active experimentation
You are encouraged to be experimental in these exercises; it doesn’t matter if you make a mess or get things wrong in the images you make. It is important to reinforce this message at this point in the creative process, as often people tighten up when they think they are embarking on the final piece, and lose some of the fluidity and spontaneity of their original ideas. We want to keep the visual outcome of this exercise fresh and not stultified by perceived conventions of what is ‘right’.
When you’re exploring visual ideas and processes, the outcomes may not always be what you thought they would be at the outset. You won’t always get it right the first time, and this is how it should be. By repeatedly trying out and experimenting with the materials and ideas at hand, you’ll discover new ways of working. Occasionally ‘mistakes’ turn into happy accidents and prompt a way of working, or technique, that you might choose to deliberately recreate and integrate into your next project. For example, one colour may bleed into another, or your coffee cup might leave a stain on your working paper. Instead of throwing these elements away, you could integrate them into your design process.
Organising images
When you’ve created a set of images, scan or photograph these to create digital files – JPEGS or TIFFs on your computer. Make sure the resolution is set at 300dpi. Having gathered all the images together in one folder, consider how you’re going to print them. What order will the images appear in? At what size? How will the image appear on the page? Which paper will you use for which image? Do you have a particular image in mind for a particular piece of paper? Will you try printing the same image on different sheets of paper?
Draw a simple flatplan as a guide to working out how and where the image will be placed on the page, whether you will include any text, and to explore how the idea of ‘narrative’ might work. You might set up your page layout in DTP software, and work with your images digitally in this way, or you may simply print direct from your photo editing software onto the paper samples.
Printing
You may choose to use a desktop printer to output your images, or you may research other print methods such as screen-printing or etching. Print at least 16 pages using the images you’ve created on the paper samples you have collected.
Images and Prints
I was quite confused by what the goal of the exercise was, other than just printing images on papers available, which my printer would accept, the answer — not many. As for the images gathered, it made sense to just go back to the “Sequencing images” exercise and take what I had made for that purpose, since the images were already print-ready, and I then tried to form a new narrative of some kind out of the set of images.
Bleak future
In this page, the man watches as fate is decided for him, but so does the cow, as it sees that its future is set by its owner. Regardless of the huge difference in intelligence, both creatures are equal in powerlessness in front of beings of greater power, who perform their actions without care for those that they impact.
I specifically chose to print the page on the blue coloured paper in order to convey the sad and bleak nature of the message.
Movement/Stillness
The images are meant to contrast the act of being on a journey with the decision to stay still and enjoy the moment. The dog represents the unlikely travels that a person may embark on, while the horses shows a more realistic journey as they travel along an established path. The orange is a metaphor to enjoying the fruits of your labour, and the gramophone is simply meant to demonstrate the act of relaxing doing something that you like.
I could not really think of a way of emphasising the message with the papers that my printer would accept, but I suppose I could have done something with the colours of the images.
Sound/Silence
This layout is meant to contrast sound, conveyed through the gramophone and the sparrow, against the silence that we may experience in the face of celestial bodies, represented by fate and a comet.
Once again, I do not think that paper choice would have made any difference, and inverting the hierarchy of the images would have been the way to go, as in making the celestial bodies be the biggest elements on the page.
Success/Destruction
This page contrasts success, represented by cheering with a glass of wine, as well the the map to show human accomplishment, against the act of destruction, as shown by the broken disc and the WW1 military plane.
Since I did not have an intense red colour paper, I went for the closest thing I had, but it did not deliver the impact that I would have wanted.
Conclusion
While I understand that ideally I would have been able to experiment with many different types of paper, that is just not the case, and it just seems like I simply repeated what I have already done previously. As a matter of fact, I had already tested printing some of my experimental typography designs on the papers that I had gathered, to understand which papers my printer would accept, as well as to see what the resulting print would look like. That is how I decided what paper to use when I printed these same images for the collating and binding exercise. Simply put, my printer’s limitations are not a good indication of the result that I would obtain if my designs were professionally printed. Nevertheless, I will be taking every opportunity to learn the difference in papers and printing results in the future when I make use of professional printing services.
OCA Graphic Design 