Awareness Poster: An Existential Threat

 

"Slaughter Season Is Upon Us"

My final poster is on the growing issue of giant asian murder hornets in the northwest, meant to be eye-catching (especially with regards to the typography) and easy to grasp quickly. I used a colony of dead bees for the backdrop, with a dying bush and wasp nest in the midground, plus withering flowers, a queen murder hornet, her crown, her sceptor, and a giant murder hornet face in the foreground. All the plants are made to look like they're dying, a horrifying potential consequence of a world devoid of bees. Without them, everything falls apart.  

I very much say what I mean and mean what I say in this piece--the honeybee needs us, and we need it. The time has come for war on this menacing invasive species. If we can't root it out in five years' time, scientists don't think we'll ever be able to purge them.

Made using:

Bibliography:

Betteridge-Moes, Maxine. “More Research Needed on Giant Asian Hornet (Aka the 'Murder Hornet') Says Local Expert.” KitchenerToday.com, Rogers Media, 6 May 2020, www.kitchenertoday.com/regional-news/more-research-needed-on-giant-asian-hornet-aka-the-murder-hornet-says-local-expert-2330128.

Grant, Bonnie L. “Amaryllis Care After Flowering: Learn About Post Bloom Care Of Amaryllis.” Gardening Knowhow, 4 Apr. 2018, www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/bulbs/amaryllis-hippeastrum/amaryllis-care-after-flowering.htm.

Lowry, Staci Ann, and Staci Ann Lowry. “OG Inspire: Queen Bee Crown.” The Ornament Girl, 25 Apr. 2019, theornamentgirl.com/blog/quilted-ornament-ideas/queen-bee-crown/.

Nathmal, Sha. “Snb Royal Sceptor Costume Halloween Theatre Stage Prop King Queen Scepter.” Snapdeal.com, Sha Nathmal & Bros, www.snapdeal.com/product/snb-royal-sceptor-costume-halloween/602503583.

Services, WND News. “Millions of Honeybees Killed by Zika Spraying.” WND, WND, 2 Sept. 2016, www.wnd.com/2016/09/millions-of-bees-dead-after-zika-spraying/.

Shimizu, Tetsuya. “Queen of Vespa Mandarinia Japonica, Stereo Cross View.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 10 June 2015, www.flickr.com/photos/mushimizu/18054513653/.

Siedlecki, Piotr. “Withered Flower Free Stock Photo - Public Domain Pictures.” Free Stock Photo - Public Domain Pictures, www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=175013.

Stef, and Stef. “Winter Freeze Injury to Plants.” Boulder Tree, 18 Apr. 2015, www.bouldertree.com/winter-freeze-injury-plants/. 

Module 3 Sketches: Awareness Poster Concepts

I scanned my sketches in this time for the sake of better picture quality and quickly fiddled with some contrast settings to make it easier to make out. Like always, sorry for my horrible handwriting, I can type it out if it's super hard to read.

My first concept revolves around raising awareness about the fake ballot drop boxes in California, encouraging people to look out for those and any possible copycats, and generally be careful when entrusting their ballots to others, without discouraging mail-in voting in any way. My favorite of these is probably the top row, second image to the right, "Reality doesn't have asterisks," but I probably won't be choosing those designs because there are so many other people who have jumped on that first. 

These are some (linked-to-source) images I used to develop my sketches:

My second concept is an awareness poster concerning the giant asian murder hornets that have recently made their way to the USA. I'm more likely to pick this one both because it's really heavy on my mind right now, and because I haven't seen much information about them floating around other than their decapitation of honeybees threatening the entire bee population. I think the reports would be met with more urgency if they realized that we've found one over-wintered queen dead, and she may have lain up to 300 queens last fall. Unlike bees they don't seem to go all highlander on each other, they mostly just go in a different direction from their mother when it comes time to overwinter, and we only have a few years to trap and burn them out before it becomes impossible to eradicate them all without killing everything in the area, too. 

 

If I were going to choose one of the hornet designs I'd probably go with one of these two:

My final concept has to do with raising awareness about the eminent domain abuses and injustices occurring in the name of the border wall. There are a bunch of American citizens getting trapped on the Mexico side or having all or most of their land taken for absurdly low sums--one family that owned a ranch was offered barely more than ten thousand dollars, and to get something closer to the actual value of what they lost many victims have to sue. National parks and monuments are under blast to clear room for the wall. In particular the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is both a home to a number of threatened and endangered species, and a sacred burial site to the ancestors of two local tribes.

The one with the mountain as a headstone might be the one I go with if I decide to go with this concept.

Photomontage Image Hijack Final Project, "Inferno"

 

Charles O'Rear's "Bliss"

Meghan D. Coates's "Inferno"

    The political issue I chose was global warming/climate change, an issue near and dear to my heart since my early childhood, the first issue I ever protested or made protest art for. I was right about so many things, and as I watch the world burn down around me (it feels literal--the pandemic has me stuck in California, where I’ve been watching the sky catch fire and the smoke choke out the sun for the last month or two) I can’t stop thinking about the way the climate has changed since I was small--October didn’t used to be the hottest month of the year, New York Christmases were once white instead of brown, and the Arctic Circle was all ice and no flame.

    This piece uses the Windows XP default home screen, “Bliss,” as the backbone, paired with pieces taken from Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer, the Microsoft XP Logo-flag, and images accompanying Richard E. Peltier’s “Hazards of Breathing Wildfire Smoke...,” and Rebecca Perring’s “Massive Fire Breaks Out...,” arranged and manipulated to more properly resemble the world as (it feels) we’ve made it in the time since the original photograph was taken (January 1996), around a year and ten months before I was born. Using the Death Dealer as something akin to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse pausing near the crest of the hill, it's meant to be a bleak and heavy-handed reminder that the world no longer really has a chance to go back to the way things were; our only opportunity is to fight to keep them from getting worse than they’ve already been made, and we’re running out of time.

    I think ideally I would display this as a billboard, to make it something larger than life that people weren’t able to avoid.   

Bibliography:

“Bliss (Image).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(image). 

Comics, Cap'n's. Death Dealer by Frank Frazetta, CAP'N'S COMICS , 1 Jan. 1970, capnscomics.blogspot.com/2014/04/death-dealer-by-frank-frazetta.html. 

“Microsoft Windows.” Logopedia, logos.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Windows. 

Peltier, Richard E. “The Hazards of Breathing Wildfire Smoke.” Pacific Standard, Grist, 8 Dec. 2017, psmag.com/environment/health-hazards-of-breathing-wildfire. 

Perring, Rebecca. “Massive Fire Breaks out at Factory Sending Plumes of Black Smoke 200ft into the Air.” Express.co.uk, Express.co.uk, 29 Dec. 2015, www.express.co.uk/news/uk/630112/Leicester-fire-factory-river-smoke.

Module 2 Sketches: Photomontage Concepts

Sorry for my terrible handwriting and drawing abilities ahead of time. It would look a lot better if I wasn't required to put so many sketches on each page. I have very bad, awful handwriting and pretty poor fine motor skills in general, and making things big is generally how I get around that. Let me know if it's completely illegible, and I'll type up a transliteration.

My first concept has to do with altering the Windows XP default background screen (Bliss by Charles O'Rear

) to reflect the current and future effects of climate change, with maybe some surreal and threatening overtones using Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer (

) and other such properties, darkening and muddying the colors, adding smoke and smokestacks and haze and whatnot. I really want to go for that de-familiarization of a familiar image thing. 

My second concept is in altering the photograph taken by Rachel Posner ("Death To Judah"

) to reflect our modern political climate. I had more difficulty with this one than I did with the windows screen, probably because it's a less neutral image, so it's harder to use it to say something new. I had a rough time figuring out what three of the many ideas I come back to routinely I should be using to look for pictures, and I had a lot of trouble finding famous images that didn't already have a bunch of edits up for view on google. I wish I'd been able to find a repository of randomly sorted famous images, but it was super difficult to find anything noteworthy but not played out without knowing exactly what I wanted ahead of time.

I had a really hard time trying to come up with an anti-Confederate symbol other than the black power fist. The popular abolitionist statue Greek Slave symbol was the best I could think of, aside from maybe a pair of shackles hanging from the window or something, which maybe I should've illustrated in hindsight, but the deed is done now.

This is a really new artform for me, I'm not used to building so heavily off the work of other visual artists/photographers. I've made fanworks before, but creating a fanwork implies a nod of fealty or inferiority to the original, and I'm used to writing and drawing, not copying and pasting. And in the past when I have done some collage work on the computer it's always been something I did without sketching, just started going as soon as I had all the pictures together that I wanted/needed. This is a learning experience to be sure.

I left a sketch in from a concept I'm thinking I'll probably abandon--the VJ Day Kiss (VJ Day, Times Square, New York

) overlaid with low opacity images of both Biden and Trump being creepy around women/girls and some text from the woman's testimony on the event, but I'll probably leave that be for now. Probably.

Finally, I wanted to liken Pence to Himmler by using footage both from Himmler's visit to concentration camps, and from Pence's visits to family detention centers--as well as Pence's visit to the actual Holocaust memorial in Dachau.