Unfortunately the handwritten notes done in Pentel sign pen are water soluble, so when I pasted them up they would blur if I went over them more than a brief once with the paste brush. The solution was to make sure I put most of the paste on before the poster and to avoid the words as much as possible when fixing the poster down.
The diagonal stripe on the colouring effect, although appealing out of context, actually works to break up the words and make the message less eyecatching and even less legible. Silver stripes are the hardest to read, and also reduce legibility even horizontally. I think these issues are compounded because the words are over the white/black background of the faces, because I didn’t have the same silver legibility issues when striping the words directly onto dark backgrounds like bins in Temple Cowley (Eval post Temple Cowley graffiti). Pink is the easiest colour to notice and read over a complicated background, which is worth remembering .
The blue+pink=purple stripe pattern is also a solid choice for legibility.
Also on this round of posters, I tested whether or not I could use wheatpaste to put up fabric work. I can!! It used a bit more paste because I wanted to be sure the fabric would be saturated, and it probably would be easier for someone to take down because the fabric would rip less easily than paper, but it did work. I’ve had to table developing the portraits idea for now*, in favor of getting the zine ready for the final show, but this means in future I can explore the tactility potential of using fabric in street art.
*I also think it’s too early to try to fully-fledge this idea, both because I haven’t thought through the portraits concept properly, and because I’m not skilled enough at rendering recognizable portraits yet. Is the concept fleshed out? Does it really communicate a message? Also, does commemorating our past elders like this imply that the faces posters are memorial pieces for dead people rather than celebrations of current lives.
to the touch 