Calligram

My first real “hand it in” art project in more than 30 years.  The last time I did anything to be graded was in High School – that was 1983. Yikes!  Prof Tortorelli set us to task, and this was all about learning text manipulation using Adobe Illustrator.  He also declared “I don’t care what your major is…in this class you’re all ARTISTS!  And I want you to push yourselves as artists.  Make yourselves uncomfortable.  Push the boundaries.”  Music to my ears.

I sketched out three proposals – two were political, and one was just plain risky.  It was uncomfortable.  A classy nude.  That was it.

I started with a random photo from the ‘net.  Obviously there’s a plethora of material to choose from, but I set Google’s search sights on “nude torso black and white.”  The sixth photo in the search spoke to me immediately.  I searched all over the ‘net for the photographer so I could ask to use this piece, but all I found was “photographer unknown, model unknown.”  I don’t know who you are, but thank you for your work.

With so much shading, I needed to figure out how to overlay words/phrases in a consistent way, so I threw the photo into Adobe Photoshop and ran a “Posterize” filter with six layers.  This gave me the foundation to begin.  After posterizing, I converted the image to vector paths in Illustrator, which smoothed things out quite a bit.  I thought this would be an “easy” task of selecting a vector shape, doing some copy/paste work, then using the “Object-Envelope Distort-Make With Top Object” function to quickly fill in the form.  Not so much.  I started working from bottom to top, and you can see some bottom areas are a bit quirky while I was trying to work out the best processes to overlay and distort the words to follow the form.
 

Time ran out on me last week, so I handed in what I could for a grade.  I thought I was close to being finished, but I was really only about half-way done.  At this point, I had 173 layers in Illustrator.  Although I had handed the piece in for a grade already, I wanted to finish this first work.

I primarily used this technique in Illustrator:  Draw a path following shapes/contours using the Pencil tool.  Insert words/phrases using the Type On Path tool, adjusting font sizes, etc to fit the path.  Stretch, warp, fill the area using Envelope Distort – Make With Mesh, modifying the mesh rows & columns according to the overall shape I was trying to fill.  After modifying the text, finish with a shade of color.  I used the “beach” color palette, as that gave me some consistent colors to add just a bit of pop (lips, breasts and belly button).  

I thought about going crazy with multiple colors and shades, but I thought it would lose class if I turned it into a “paint by numbers” project.  While the “words” were done, I felt that it was too “sharp” and needed just a bit of shading to soften it up.  For that I used a technique I learned when doing my Chris Duarte posters a while ago.  You can see the series HERE.  I used a Photoshop Displacement filter, with the top layer (the words) set to blend as a linear burn with the bottom layer, the original photo that was Gaussian blurred and modified with more brightness and contrast.  And that was that.  Done.

So there are a lot of words and nothing repeats.  Where did all that come from?  Many thanks to Pandora’s streaming service.  I set the station to “Muse” and simply re-typed/modified lyrics for the hours that I was at this project.  I finished with 351 Illustrator layers, then an additional couple of layers in Photoshop for the Displacement filter.  This work was an estimated 20 hours sitting in front of my PC over the past several weeks.  I loved it.