I was searching for a quote online when I arrived at this one which I thought was quite interesting to explore. It was pretty clear to use red to bring forward the idea of ‘lust’, and the element of ‘bite’ I was thinking could be represented by lips or lipsticks.
Initially it felt like red lipstick was the way to go but I wanted to explore another way of representation such as using the texture of lips.
I saw this tin cupcake holder thing in class while we were selecting materials for our mark-making and I thought that the edges of it looked like the cracked texture of our lips. So I traced out lip shapes with foam paper and glued the textured aluminium on top of it so that it would imprint the texture.
However, I couldn’t quite get the texture of the lips right because the metal was not soft enough to be moulded and stamped properly. It created gaps between the foam paper and the paper itself so it was hard to get the paint to adhere to the surface. It was very uneven.
So I decided to scrape the idea of using aluminium. And instead I tried to make direct cuts into the foam paper using a pen knife.
I REALLY loved the quality this gave to the print, because I could really bring out the details of the lips in this way. I was really happy with the way that the ‘U’ came out because it really looks like the edges of lips.
So I decided to pursue this method for the rest of my letterings.
However, the downside to using this technique was the improbability of getting a ‘perfect’ print. More often than not I had to try and cut out multiple letters and each of them only had a certain number of times they could be used because of how malleable the material is. It was easily destroyed after a few stamps due to the cuts I made with the pen knife.
It was also not easy to use this technique on letters such as ‘I’, ‘L’ and ‘T’ where they don’t have counters to create the lip markings. They were also the most easily destroyed letters due to their long stems.
So here is what my quote looks like with all the organic types. I added my lipstick mark as well for effect.
Next I wanted to create a mock up for condoms using my quote but I had a lot of difficulty doing up the condom wrapper itself to look real.
But eventually I figured out a way to do it by overlaying it over an actual condom wrapper.
I designed the box according to your the theme of lips as well so that all the fonts and vibe will tie in together.
Overall thoughts for project 2b:
I feel that it is such an important project to bring forth the early conventions of using handmade fonts. It is true that with technology, all these handmade elements would slowly disappear, but yet this project reminds us of how relevant it still is to this day. So I think that this was an important project to showcase that.
The end.