Dada Poster

For my Dada poster I was inluenced by Hannah Hoch and Raul Haussmann. I liked how they used different elements to create their posters such as; photomontage, sketches etc. For my poster I picked up some free magazines from shops and from vintage stores. These magazines were usually music mbased or freelance designer based.The whole idea of my poster was to do with a poster for a festival. It was meant to be just a teaser poster to advertise the festival months in advance to get viewers enticed.

I noticed how in Hannah Hochs’ work she tore a lot of images etc out from newspapers or magazines from her time. To reperesent Dada I needed to do this to fro my poster, so using the free magazines I tore out images   and words of dfferent fonts and laid them out on a piece of paper randomly so it reflected Dadism effectively. I also drew some random sketches or patterns etc over the images to reflect what Hannah Hoch did in her designs. After creating my design and sticking everything down, I scanned my poster in.

 This was the first part of my poster I scanned in as it was an a4 scanner yet my poster was on an a3 sheet

 This was the second part of my a3 poster that I scanned in

I opened an a3 photoshop document where I dropped both of the scanned images in. I placed the photos in the position that they were in my a3 sketchbook. I noticed that when the photos lined up, they was an obvious line in the middle where they were meant to join so I decided I would rotate the top photo to create more randomness in my photo and obscurity.

  I noticed that on my poster the top of the poster showed the top of my sketchbook and affected the overall visual impact of the poster. I decided I would use the clone tool to patch up the top of the poster and proximity match with the clone tool. I selected a clone point from the poster and then cloned over the top of the poster which I didn’t like so much.

 This is what the cloned layer looks like without the first part/layer of my poster switched on. As you can see it resembles elements from the image below, such as the lines and the paper.

 I then noticed in Dada posters they seemed to look very sepia or kind of coffee stained so I decided I would put a photo filter over my layers. I used a brown-red like colour which made it look kind of retro and sepia like but I was not very convinced with the colour so I changed the colour.

Alexander Rodchenko (Russian Constructivism)

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivismand Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. He was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles, usually high above or down below, to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: “One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”

In 1905, Rodchenko and his family moved to Kazan. It was at that time that Rodchenko made the decision to study art. He entered the Kazan School of Fine Arts in 1910 and graduated in 1914. In February of that year he attended lectures by several Russian Futurists, one of them being Vladimir Mayakovsky. He became a proponent of Futurism, (which at that time consisted of a wide range of avant-garde experimentation going on in Russia). In 1915, nearly a year after WWI began in Russia, Rodchenko moved to Moscow and enrolled in the Graphic section of the Stroganov School of Applied Art. During his time there he was a part of many exhibitions including one for the magazine, The Store, which was organized by Vladimir Tatlin. From 1917 to 1921 Rodchenko had his own exhibition entitled Exhibition of Works by Rodchenko (1910-1917) in Moscow, produced his first collages using found photography, and is a part of 16 art exhibitions. During this time he had abandoned the Futurist style for a completely abstract and highly geometric aesthetic. In the early 1920s Rodchenko left painting behind, proclaiming it’s death in 1921 in the June issue of MoMA, and took up different types of art including photomontage (he was one of the first to experiment with it), furniture design, poster, book & typographic design, believing these forms of art to be more effective is communicating the messages of the soviet union. His work from this point on echoed what was going on in the Communist Regime during that time. Within that year he became involved and was a huge leader in the Constructivist movement (whose followers favored strict geometric forms and crisp graphic design) in Russia. During the movement he formed the first working group of Constructivists. Rodchenko played a large part in the Constructivist movement, essentially making it what it was, just as it, in return, made Rodchenko who he was. The Constructivists were the first group of artists in a long time to consider themselves more important and useful to society as a whole. In 1923 he started creating his own photography and received many graphic design commissions for book covers and posters. He became the principal designer for the magazine Lef, a publication for the Lef group, a group of avant-garde writers and intellects associated with poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky’s poem “Pro eto” was accompanied by photocollage illustrations done by Rodchenko. He was soon doing all of Mayakovsky’s book covers. Rodchenko’s graphic design work achieved much of it’s clarity and directness from his utilization of letters of the alphabet and elements taken from photographs, staying in a flat dimension of space with a limited color palette of only black, red, white and greys. Rodchenko continued to pull in commissions for photography and advertising throughout the rest of his life. He was a part of over 50 art exhibitions before his death in 1956 in Moscow.