Process and Production: Propaganda Posters with Nick Deakin

Propaganda Posters

For today's workshop with Nick Deakin we're getting our hands dirty, with paint. In this workshop we will be creating minimal propaganda posters inspired by the 1968 french student protests and riots, the propaganda of that period in particular. These posters were crudely made for mass production with screen printers in occupied universities accompanied with various slogans such as 'Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible.' ("Be realistic, ask the impossible.") Below are some examples of these posters.

We will be creating similar designs but instead of a screen printer we will be using acrylic paint of red, blue and yellow and paint rollers. I've always found propaganda posters to be fascinating because they're not meant to the be perfectly designed, they're supposed to be crude and able to be produced by anyone, just as long as they're able to get the message across.

To begin with, each student picked up a piece of paper with the name of an object or subject. I got 'Police Officer' and this gave me the idea to create an officer with a riot shield for my poster design. Inspired by the game 'Rainbow Six Siege' a video game that I play in my leisure, I will be creating a poster design of one of the french operators who is an officer with a riot shield, Montagne.  

With the use of a reference image I created a stencil outline of the character and cut it out in preparation for printing, When it comes to creating stencils you have to be careful not to have sections of the paper too thin otherwise when printing this can risk the stencil taring mid way. This means stencils can't be too detailed when looking at the image above compared to the stencil I created below, you can see a huge difference in the level of detail, especially the shield.  

After the stencil was cut out it was time to begin printing, I used a thick coat of red paint to make the design look really bold on the poster. It turned out rather well and one thing I noticed was that if you were to look at the poster landscape, it looks like a city-scape with a factory with smoke bellowing out of it. This goes hand in hand with the next bit which is putting text on the poster. 

Like the subject, each student took a piece of paper with a phrase on, for this I got the phrase 'Choke me, Smoke the air' Which I thought worked extremely well for this poster for two reasons, one is that like I stated before with the poster turned landscape the arm looks like smoke bellowing out of a factory. The other actually relates to the character and game the design is inspired by, in Rainbow Six Siege, there is another operator called Smoke who uses yellow smoke and gas as his in-game ability, so as a reference to this I decided to paint the text yellow.

Below is the outcome of this workshop and I think it turned out rather well, I tried to add some details with blue paint but I didn't particularly like how it looked, so in the end I decided to only do the details of the face and part of the shield. This workshop was yet again a refreshing step back from working on computers and digital art. I Might actually give this poster another go in my spare time and see if I could do something differently and experiment with the design a bit.