So after hours of playing with sunflowers and people and collage (see here), I remembered how I had loved abstracting words, which i have done as design for books (see here, here and no doubt many other places which don’t come to mind right now).
Combing through my evernote files of poetry, i came upon an extract of Spoiler by Hala Alyan. Published in September last year, mid-pandemic (how long will it last?).
The lines I chose to use are:
Whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful
I stylised the words across nine 5x5cm plates, you’ll see them in the photos below. And then to add more texture I cut out some part of it. That was the thing which made the plates work so well (many of the prints I made used the back of the plates and they were just as beautiful as the ones I made from the correct side).
Things I haven’t done with the open press plates that I would like to try:
- typewriting onto the plates so it’s kind of embossed
- use the cricut to cut some complex shapes
- try some more long narrow plates
