For this assignment, we were to explore using different elements and principles of design to produce 297mm x 297mm abstract prints based on the lines of three famous nursery rhymes, with each rhyme divided into four.
The first rhyme I tackled was “Hey Diddle Diddle”, namely the opening line involving a feline and its questionable association with a musical instrument. Converting the image of the cat to black and white caused the loss of its top outline, so I attempted to replace the missing outline with an implied line formed by dozens of fiddles in the background. The ‘fiddle’ layer was duplicated well over twenty times and the duplicates were re-sized and placed semi-randomly, using the tiny white outline on its left side to imply depth at the points of overlap. The heavy blackness of the mass of fiddles also helped to offset the shadow at the bottom of the cat, balancing the image out nicely.
Still in the same rhyme, I moved on to the next line, involving a chunk of galactic rock and a particularly ambitious bovine (hey look, I made a rhyme!). I had earlier found an intriguingly beautiful and intricate series of carvings done on cow skulls during my search for images for the image pool. Processed in Photoshop, the skull took on a metallic shine, it was both breathtakingly beautiful and bone-chillingly eerie. A similarly haunting image of the moon (with a reflection) was hence chosen and then treated to the same adjustments in Photoshop to produce the same effect. The skulls now radiate out and ‘over’ the moon, and in the centre a large skull hangs like a looming trophy as it conquers the moon. The overall design forms a downwards-pointing/top-heavy aggressive and dynamic triangle while hinting at the playful element of circles, with a strong emphasis on bilateral symmetry.
Next came the matter of the fleeing cutlery. The spoon shoots off in a diagonal direction, warped to create perspective and movement, with the plates looking as though they were trailing out in the wake of the spoon’s flight. The empty centre of this Welsh spoon’s interlaced handle allowed not only for a greater exaggeration of the warped perspective, but also allowed me to insert more plates behind the spoon to create an illusion of depth and quantity.
Ah yes, the poor crone with the baffling nightmare that is her over-abundance of progeny. In this composition, I filled all the spaces with the creepy smiling faces of the Clara Dolls, with the contrast adjusted to draw attention to their wide, unblinking eyes. This was then overlaid with a grey scale image of the dolls with a Screen filter. The background was filled black, and a subtle radial blur was applied to the black and white dolls. The old woman in the centre looks horrified and overwhelmed in equal measure, with her hands up both in surrender and in self-defence.
Naturally, the old woman deals with her excess of children by giving them naught but soup (probably kept the bread for herself). Here the children are entrapped (with their paltry soups) within the splits in a loaf of bread (that they don’t have) while the old woman in question frees herself from the headache of her children to go and enjoy her bread in peace.
In the next rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, a monarch pools together his (entire) mounted cavalry to rescue a man (egg?) of dubious importance. Perhaps he is a particularly compassionate king? The symbol of the king, his crown, takes obvious hierarchical importance with its central placement and large size. Armoured horses bow on either side to the crown, forming a central ascending path to it with their heads. Above, the top image is a pure vector composition, while the one at the bottom displays the slight fuzz of a half tone filter.
“Wait,” you might say, “didn’t the rhyme go thus: ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men‘? What happened to them?” Fret not, I haven’t forgotten them.
There they are!
Now let’s say Humpty Dumpty was a man, and not an egg (seriously though, how did the egg thing start?), and that his ‘fall’ was metaphorical, and not literal. Broken mirrors have long been symbolic of characters with shattered psyches because of the way they distort the character’s reflection. Even though the overall shape maintains the outline of a bust, and although all the necessary ‘parts’ are present, no matter how qualified the king’s esteemed soldiers are, they’d be little more effective at fixing Mister Humpty than plasters would be to a broken mirror. The image at the bottom carries the pixelated simplification of a half tone filter.
