These are my final images. I tried to compare them to the Lenin images on the left and even used them as a template sometimes which resulted in a mess as my knowledge of photoshop isn't very good at the time of making this. However, my pictures clearly do not look like them. I liked the strand a lot and decided to do pick it as my final strand but would put much more effort into my work making them actually look like propaganda posters in a Rodchenko style.
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My favourite strand is the propaganda strand by Alexander Rodchenko because I think that the points he was making can still be relevant to the world today. With huge world problems such as global warming, Brexit and Donald Trump, I think making a propaganda poster could still be used for some of these things today. Although saying these things I did not create a poster on global warming, Brexit or Donald Trump as my holiday to Lisbon, Portugal, inspired me to choose Portugal's communist past.
Portugal had formerly been a communist country lead by The PCP (Portugese Communist Party) for just under 50 years (1926-1974). One of the first leaders/dictators was a man by the name of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar who was one of the most influential figures at the time. He died in 1968 although the party continued to rule until 1974. In 1974 however, there was a revolution to overthrow the then government which was successful and is now known as the Carnation Revolution. But I did not do my poster on the revolution, in fact, I chose to do a poster based on a famous picture of young Salazar reading some kind of booklet in a chair (which you can see on the top right). I wanted to recreate this image and after trying many times I finally got the picture I wanted of my Dad in a suit reading the newspaper but staring back at the camera so it would be more forceful and disturbing on my poster (I had him also look at the news but it didn't have such an uncomfortable feeling to it). Once I had the picture, I changed it to black and white keeping close attention to his dark suit and the shines on his face which I couldn't completely portray on my image (you can see underneath the original). After this, it was time to start editing to which I would try and link to Rodchenko's work but also some other propaganda pieces I had seen on holiday such as Carla Filipe's work in the Maat Museum (below this text). Her work was very colourful and had many different pictures and drawings on the front which I liked but was different to Rodchenko's one colour and one image. I tried to combine the two and what you see below the Carla Filipe work are my developments of my poster. |
In my second development, I focused a bit more on Rodchenkos work referring to how his backgrounds are block colours and not the background from the original picture (like the image to the right of this text). I tried to add stripes like him and once again add the posters I had seen in Portugal for the PCP. once again, it wasn't right as I thought that the red and white were too bright for what is meant to be an old poster, and the posters didn't really fit into the image as a whole (also note the scrappy cut out of the hair which I didn't bother cleaning up as I knew I wasn't going to use this picture).
Editing this picture was hard at the time because it took me a long time to do the background because I didn't understand that I had to cut my Dad out to create another layer. I did eventually figure it out and cut my dad out with the quick selection tool to create that extra layer. I didn't move the extra layer and when I selected the background layer, and because I had already changed the background colour to red by using the quick selection tool pressing delete and then changing the colour to to red, I placed white stripes over the red using the rectangle tool and so when I clicked on the top layer, the stripes wouldn't be through my Dad. Lastly, I once again copied and pasted the cropped posters using cmd c then cmd v. |
This poster was an attempt at adding a border to my image like one of Rodchenko's which has a sort of border (see picture on the right of this text) and adding the Portugese colours. I scrapped the other little images because as much as I liked Filipe's work, but all the images she used were cartoon-like and all linked together to which mine did not. This time also, the text was a previous quote from Salazar which translated to "A life at the service of the nation". I liked this quote although I wasn't sure about it being on a propaganda poster but I did like the fact that the text's were at the top and bottom of the poster like Rodchenko.
This image of my Dad was cropped slightly so that when I placed it over a background of red and green (which I did by getting a random image, selecting the whole image using the quick selection tool then pressing delete and changing the colour to red and finally using the rectangular marquee tool to select the top, press delete and change the top to green to portray the portugese flag) a border would be created around the image. For the text, the horizontal text tool was used again just like every other picture and the colours of them were changed. |
I was starting to make my images look alot more like Rodchenko's. This poster had a block colour background and a border but neither looked quite right in my eyes. The blue was too deep and too clean whereas the border was strange that it was only on one side and had communist signs all over it and this was a bit like Filipe's work but it just wouldn't work on what I was trying to create. One thing I did like from this was the colour of the font which I had stolen from one of Rodchenko's pieces, using the eyedropper tool, as it needed that old, cream colour to it.
I also did the same as my last development for this image in terms of editing but instead of making the border on all of the sides it, it was only on the top and left side of the image as I had placed my Dad on the right and bottom of the image. Before this though, I used the quick selection tool and selected my Dad but then inversed the selection, by going to select then inverse, and changed the background to a colour like my previous images. I then used a poster I had seen which had the communist sign on, but didn't include the star for some reason, and copied and pasted one using cmd c and then cmd v so they would all be the same size. I then placed them on the border and wrote my text using the colour from the image on the right of this text by using the eyedropper tool to do so. |