Self Publishing: Wall Mural

In this process and production session we experimented with type designs in groups of 7 before agreeing on a favourite and then using it to create a giant wall mural. The activity would help us work with other people as a team and give us ideas on how we would approach a big project for the future.

Each group chose a word from a hat at random and our group got the word "Prend le!" Our first task after this was to generate different typefaces. After each person had an idea we collected them up and voted for a favourite.

This typeface was the winner which was drawn on gridded paper because the plan was to have each grid as an A2 page and then this drawing could be used as a guide. 

Our next task was to copy the type face on to a much larger art board. We had 30 pages of A2 paper which would act as a frame and then we put each frame together like a jigsaw puzzle. When we finished drawing the typeface, again we pulled another word from a hat but this time it would be a colour we had to use to paint our type. The colour we pulled out was yellow and we decided that our type would look good if we painted the inside and outside of our 3D letters, instead of painting the letter itself. When we finished doing this we found we had a problem which was seeing the pencil from our drawing because the yellow was so bright. Our solution to this was to also paint the outline of our word with a thin brush which looked even better than out previous idea.

Now our final task was to put our type up on a wall and use a camera to create a stop motion reveal of our word. As a team we agreed that a transition where every 3 tiles from the left is revealed and continues towards the right would look the best. We began by sticking all our pages to the wall but in a random order and then starting from the left we would put 3 tiles in the correct order and then take a photo. We repeated this process until getting all the way to the right side where by then the whole word was revealed.

What Did I learn?

I mainly learnt how I would approach painting such a big art board without getting any of the positioning of my drawings mixed up and the solution to this was to draw the image in frames and then use each frame as a page. This made the whole process so much easier and gave a sense of organisation because it works as breaking the image down by focusing on one frame at a time only looking at what goes in that space. While you are drawing in each frame you forget about the overall image and then you start to worry about what it will look like at the end but it all falls together and surprisingly works very well.