What was your source of inspiration?

The project called for making a photo collage poster inspired by a book, movie, story, person, etc. I decided to design a poster based off of the short story called “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson. To summarize, a woman and her husband have rented out an estate. The narrator (a woman) suffers from what her husband saw as a “temporary nervous depression” so he ordered her to rest in the estate. The woman is uncomfortable with the estate, in a room that her husband picked out that has ugly yellow wallpaper. As the story goes on, the woman is convinced that there is a woman trapped within the wallpaper.  I read this story in high school but it left an impression on me, partly because I was fascinated by the way in which the woman in the story describes and was so enraptured by the yellow wallpapered walls of her room.

These 2 passages from “The Yellow Wallpaper” are the main inspiration for the poster design. These passages are placed nearly one after each other with a break between them in the story:

“I really have discovered something at last.
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.
The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.
And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Perkins
————-
“I think that woman gets out in the daytime!
And I’ll tell you why – privately  I’ve seen her!
I can see her out of every one of my windows!
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.” (Perkins 654)

Why did you choose this composition/narrative?

In terms of composition, I approached this project from the perspective of someone tasked with designing a book cover for “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As a result, I wanted to make it look simple but modern. I wanted the poster to reflect the aforementioned passage about how the narrator sees a woman coming out of the wallpaper. For the yellow wallpaper, which serves as more of a foreground for my poster, I didn’t want to fill it entirely with this vintage patterned yellow wallpaper I found. I felt that the pattern might be excessive since I was going for a more simple look. Therefore, instead, I made a solid yellow background to represent the wallpaper and cropped parts of the patterned wallpaper I found onto it. I liked this choice as I feel like overall, overlaying small swatches of the patterned wallpaper adds a bit of texture to the poster that would otherwise be flat.

I also tried to make the woman that the narrator sees crawling out of the wallpaper in the story look like they “stepped out” of the wallpaper and into the real world in my poster. That’s why you see the repeated iterations of a crouched woman looking like she’s moving on a diagonal, growing in size until her form is half in the wallpaper and half out of the wallpaper. She has “gotten out.”

The black lines you see at the top right and top left I added to emphasize the “trapped” feeling that the narrator of the story feels as well as to emphasize how contained the woman in the wallpaper was.

Where did you get your content?

I used found images from Google. For the woman you see on the poster, I used the magnetic lasso tool to outline the shape of the woman from the original photo. I also found a vintage wallpaper design that I cropped and used parts of in making this poster.

What design principles did you use effectively and why?

For color, I primarily tried to focus on only having yellow shades for the actual wallpaper itself – it it is called “The Yellow Wallpaper” so I wanted to make that obvious. However, I used a solid yellow background as the actual rectangle to represent the wallpaper and added cropped images of actual vintage yellow wallpaper to add on top of that so that there was a bit more “texture” to the wallpaper than it being just a single color.

I wanted the “creeping woman” to be a main focus of the poster. Therefore, for the design of the woman the narrator finds in the wallpaper, I tried to focus on using white space, scale, repetition, contrast, and movement. I made the woman you see in the poster be part of the negative or white space of the poster. Whereas the foreground is all yellow or patterned wallpaper, the woman contrasts to it with by being white. Additionally, I use repetition and movement here as the creeping woman in the poster is repeated four times in the poster, seeming to move along a diagonal line in the poster from left to right until half of the form is no longer part of the “yellow wallpaper.” I wanted to create some illusion of movement (hopefully I succeeded) by doing this. To emphasize this movement, I also utilized scale here as the size of the 4 creeping women figures steadily increase in size as it moves on that imaginary diagonal line. I did this to make it seem as if the woman is slowly getting closer and closer to getting herself out of the confines of the wallpaper.

What did you have issues with in Photoshop?

When editing photos from the web on another tab in photoshop, I found it difficult to understand how to use layers and adjust the hues of the picture at first. For example, I would select a layer and I would hit “Adjustments” to try and make the hue of yellow a bit darker, but it would make my entire project (all layers) look dimmer, even though I selected a specific layer/picture to make adjustments to. However, this was resolved and was really the only problem I came across. I took an Intro to Graphic Design class last semester so for the most part I didn’t run into any major issues while using Photoshop! While I like the way the title of my poster is right now, I was originally going to  use Illustrator for the title but the Illustrator software on the computers in the Rose Hill lab kept on crashing so I ultimately decided to just use Photoshop’s tools for text.

Codepen.io link: https://codepen.io/elin7/pen/OdwJgo

What thoughts or issues did you have with anything he may have said? Do you agree or disagree? How do his theories relate to current new media? (150 words.)

I agree with McLuhan’s main point on how people oftentimes focus too much on the content and not enough on the actual medium portraying that content. While I was confused reading some parts of this text, I thought that his usage of Cubanism to relay his point was especially useful in helping me to understand. With cubanism, rather than asking what the painting is about, because it is so abstract, the viewer is forced to look at the entire painting as a whole with the different patterns and things going on, focusing more on the medium (the painting) and how it conveys a message. It was a new way to view art and understand art. As for new media, similar to cubanism, I think that digital technology combined with media has continued to reinforce McLuhan’s main point as a lot of new media, in its new forms, brings forth a new change in that it forces an individual to let their senses guide them into interpreting the artwork/media. Some of these new sensory driven art exhibits lets us interpret things a new way.

Choose an artist, designer, or project. Think critically about their chosen media. Explain why they do (or do not) use the appropriate media/medium for their work. (500 words at least…….)

While I haven’t seen her work in person, I remember seeing pictures of Yayoi Kusama’s work and being absolutely captivated. Some of her Infinity Mirrored Room exhibits I think fit well with some of what McLuhan is talking about when he says “the medium is the message.” Recently, there has been a shift in interest towards more experiential and virtual experiences. With that has brought some changes in the way in which art is to be experienced. I find Kusama’s multimedia installations to reflect this. She has an “Infinity Mirror Room” series, which she started decades ago, having created about 20 rooms. Each of these Infinity Mirror Rooms contain installations of her artwork in an immersive environment. Each installation involves a dark chamber-like space that is lined with mirrors. For her 2016 The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away the room had small LED lights hanging from the ceiling that flickered and reflected off the mirrors in the room creating the illusion of endless space. Only one person is allowed to experience the installation at a time, making that person and their body becoming a part of the environment itself, fully immersed. On her work, Kusama has said that her work “[battles] at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die.” Keeping this in mind, I think that Yayoi chose the appropriate medium/media for her work. Even if someone completely new to her artwork was to go into this Infinity Mirror Room, the impact of the mediums (the lights, the mirrors, the room space, etc) used in the installation is significant and conveys a message. If you look at a photo from the installation, all of the small lights give off a cosmic look – they look like a galaxy or a sky full of bright stars. Being alone in this room creates a sense of someone being caught in a universe. The light reflecting off of the mirror extends this idea, creating a sense of interconnectedness and for me, looking at the photo, I imagine that if I was actually experiencing the installation, I too would think about my small existence in the face of a galaxy like space. For me, this kind of media/art that heightens or utilizes one’s own senses really reflect how the medium itself is impactful rather than the content it carries and the medium carries the message itself.