Let’s break it down, one design at a time, and discover how I came up with my creations. As a fan of chick flicks and comedy, you will see below how I chose my quotes and how I decided to manifest them into 2D graphic forms.
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The Devil Wears Prada
Hold on to your weaves, hunty, cause it’s gon’ get savage.
The main character in The Devil Wears Prada is none other than Miranda Priestly, played by the incomparable Helen Mirren. Her character is simply a bitch who doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings or excuses. Leading with fear and striving for excellence, Miranda Priestly has the power to dictate if you’re fashion or nah.
“Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”
I was inspired by a reality television show I watch called RuPaul’s Drag Race for my first design.
More specifically, the second season of All Stars was on air at the time and there was a main challenge that week called The Bad Bitches of Herstory where the queens had to stage a musical acting as powerful and infamous women in history.
I took inspiration and decided to use Mary I of England to substitute Miranda Priestly’s head. During her five-year reign, she had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake. This reminded me very much of Miranda.
Other elements like the Statue of Liberty and magazines were then included to add context and background. Notice what’s going on at the flame on top? That’s Madam Miranda burning Andy Sachs to death. I felt that this alternate personification of Miranda added a vintage aspect.
However, this made the image too busy with too much symbolism going on. I decided to focus just on Miranda.
Miranda with Anna Wintour’s face
Animorphism to create a fiercer commentary on Miranda’s persona
After my final consult with my lecturer, Mimi noted that the gloves had somehow morphed into claws after rendering the image. This gave us an idea of making Miranda more reptilian (cause reptiles, to me, are the scariest things on earth anyway.)
Using the nails of Drag Race queen Alaska 5000:
Cause “if you’re not wearing nails, you’re not doing drag.”
I created my final design:
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That’s all.
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White Chicks
Once you go black, you never go back, henny.
A story of two undercover cops going g incognito as two baesic white girls. My quote however was more provocative – of breastesses and milk. The first design I came up with was using classic white girl Mae West. Dandelion was used too to represent milk but my lecturer said it was too ‘safe’. That was when I knew I had the permission to let it all out. Literally.
“Your mother’s so old that her breast milk is powdered.”
I agreed with Mimi tho, this picture had nothing to do with my quote. If we talking breast, let’s show breast.
An exploration with different orientations and powders.
In an effort to make my design more vintage, I tried using an old painting.
Adding mother and child
In the end I decided to go with a vintage image of a maid and added a dark powdery background to emphasise the subject in the middle.
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Mean Girls
I ain’t trying to make fetch happen.
My direction for this quote was very clear from the start. I wanted sort of an exaggerated piece. As said in the show, “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” That’s why I went with the lingerie look in a spooky setting. My inspirations were films like Frankenstein and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I also made use of the Mickey Mouse dingbat to covey the message of my quote.
“I’m a mouse, duh.”
Putting my creation into a Halloween-ish, spooky background
For my final design, I wanted to go back to my original concept in my head of a minimalist graveyard. The moon, Frankenstein’s face and the tombstones really created a cohesive atmosphere and it was no wonder why I used this for my final design.
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She’s The Man
Gender bender androgyny realness but make it fashion.
I was pretty clueless at first on how I was going to portray this quote. First off I took inspiration from 1982 British-American musical comedy Victor/Victoria. Having an iconic logo, I felt that this was a strong symbol that could be used in my artwork.
As my initial quote was “I get really bad nosebleeds”, here was the design I came up with:
RuPaul being the World’s Greatest Drag Queen, I thought it would be fitting. This however was too direct and took the attention away from the quote and made it more about Mama Ru so I scrapped the idea and quote and went with –
“Remember, inside of every girl, there’s a boy.”
I explored with various compositions using dingbats and symbols but these were far too basic.
I was out of ideas till I did some research and came across collage artist John Stezaker
The bold way in which he cut and collaged his photos spoke to me and I decided to give his method a shot.
First of all I decided to use the iconic Rosie the Riveter. “”We Can Do It!” is an American wartime propaganda poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost worker morale.”
I decided to splice up her image and combine it with quintessential soccer player David Beckham.
The effect wasn’t too obvious so this is what I did for my final design:
Bold and brave I feel that this look is also in line with my entire Forrest Gump project. Less woodcut and more graphic, I am proud of all my work.
