Brief
Before our one week semester break, our class was tasked to create our own map based on any locations and execute the final product in the form of screen printing. My group chose coffee shops and cigarette spots in SS15. We chose that topic because smoking is the norm in SS15 and it is synonymous with coffee shops- an establishment that can be found easily in SS15. Combine the social atmosphere in coffee shops and smoking habits of its visitors, social-smokers will be born from the influence of surrounding smokers and the urge to socialize and "fitting-in". Thus, explaining the creation of this map.
Designing Process
In terms of creating the map outline, we used google maps so we could have an accurate positioning of the coffee shops that we were using as the main locations in the map. We simply traced over the lines and re-edited it in Adobe Illustrator so we could darken the lines further.
Meanwhile, for our coffee shops locations, we chose a few such as Starbucks, Alchemist Cafe, Donutes, Cosans and Coffea Coffee. To design the logos, we went with mixing coffee cups or any objects that relates to certain shops and added cigarettes to the objects to show the intertwining of the two subject matter.
Execution
To create our background for the printing, we took some masking tape and taped it onto some newspaper article to make the words from the article transfer onto our tape. We then soaked it with some water to dilute the glue. However, that didn't work so we had to tape our article words inside out- making the article unreadable. Overall, the process was quite challenging but fun too. Challenging because we had to redo our map screen printing since we didn't wash it off early on right after we did the photo transfer- thus making our print screen unusable. Overall it was an interesting way of screen printing because this is my first time using a photo emulsion for screen print. It is definitely easier to do screen printing using photo emulsion rather than the drawing fluid.
Final Product
Our final product was quite accomplishing to me and it's really satisfying to see it finally completed. For the colours, we used the purple and green as the combination since we want to put a visible contrast between the background and the logos and once the printing was done, we burned the edges of the paper to give it more of a used and retro look while also combining the cigarette aspect of our theme. Overall, it was a challenging experience as we had to redo some parts of it but the end product makes it all worth it.
Since the overall theme revolves around cigarettes and coffee shops, its simply not complete unless we have a short passage to describe this assignment the nicest way possible.
"Drinking coffee is fashionable.
Smoking is also fashionable.
But how healthy will you be
after a couple of years?
Perhaps your body will burn like this
newspaper that you read every morning
in your hands with coffee and a cigarette."
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