Moon Calendar

This was yet another one of the five briefs for Creative Design Practice, and the third I have chosen to write about on this blog. For this brief, we were the given the word of calendar. At the time, I did not know what exactly I wanted to do for it, but I did know that I wanted to do print screening, since it is something that I have really enjoyed doing in previous years and wanted to practice more and also take advantage of the facilities while I am still in university.

With this, I still needed to think of something that would possibly encompass the theme of calendar, so after a couple of hours spent on google and reading information surrounding that. I thought of the idea of doing some prints related to the idea of the several full moons that Native Americans use to distinguish the different months of the year.

Due to the time constraints of this assignment, I could not do every single month of the year, so I decided to do four of them. I tried to select the moons I would illustrate so that there would be some juxtaposition between the two sets of two images each. I picked two with animals and two with just nature.

I was not sure how many colours I wanted to use, I did try to play with the idea of opacity in prints and figure out if I could only do one colour possible, so as to save time in the process of printing since, if more than one colour, they would have to be placed individually. Because it did not seem like just one colour would work, I opted to go for two complimentary colours and looked at the wheel of colour to pick which two I preferred. In the end, I choose blue and orange as the colours.

Evidently, there is a huge difference between the images digitally and after they were screen printed. It is a result that simply cannot be done in a computer, sometimes even mistakes, through the process of printing it, are done manually that end up being happy mistakes, just will never be achieved through a digital format.

Even though, there were some hiccups with the prints, specifically when changing the opacity for them, which curiously only went wrong on the second half of each different picture, I really enjoyed the results and was quite proud of them. I do not usually do simplistic art, I always try to stick with a lot of detail and a lot of shadows and highlights, so by doing screen printing that forced me to come out of my comfort zone in that sense and it is something that I am really thankful to have done.