Summer Postcard Brief

Ok so we were asked to create several postcards that explore several colour options when it comes to print. I decided to base my work on an obsession with Dia De Los Muertos, or The Day Of The Dead, that I touched on in my taxonomy book. Here is a mexican sugar skull, I spent a few sheets developing how it would look, but it's based directly on one from my taxonomy. I decided to go with the one above as a final resolution because it's aesthetic appealed to me the most. In terms of a real printers, I would have to give the specific pantone numbers (381 U green, 508 U pink, 2905 U blue) that I had chosen to the printers if I was to use spot colours, however given that this is a full colour image and I chose CMYK compatible pantone colours, it would probably be more cost effective to ask for it to be printed in full CMYK. On a lithograph this would mean that the printer would not need to wash down all the rollers to remove the CMYK and add the spot colours. The only problem with this would be that I would have to sacrifice the vivid nature of spot colours for the duller, more limited gamut (range of colours) that CMYK can produce.

here i have explored what would happen to the colours if you overlayed them, mixing these 4 spot colours would creat a greater range of colours, however 4 spot colours would probably create a cost that's probably too high for most clientele to pay. However, like in the image below, Where I have transformed the colours to process CMYK, you can see in the overlapping how different colours can be developed. I don't like these alternate reolutions as much, though they probably do show more about colour theory in terms of going to the printers.

Here is my pictogram for obsession with day of the dead, I tried to create a thought bubble that kind of suggested that it was on my mind a lot. The real issue with this, however, is that the skull is far too complicated. It takes too long to interpret. Normally a pictogram is like a bare bones message, the print is normally one colour to strip one level of interpretation and confusion away, and I feel that the skull kind of counteracts this simplicity. I may try and work on this later because it's not very successful.

Here is my 3 colour word, I decided to avoid tints and such because I wanted it to fit with the simplicity of my full colour image. After a while, I realised the colour choices I made seemed to be partially inspired by the colours within the mexican flag (obviously tinted and changed a bit) And I think that that is what makes the image successful to me. Obviously I could of generated a few more colour variations within the image by using tints of the original colours, this would use the same colours but have a lesser or greater concentration of said colours. Again because it's keyline plus 2 spot colours, commercially it would probably be cheaper to print this at full CMYK, but it does show how 3 colour might work, with reasonable success.

Here is my 2 colour logo, after slimming down the colours to make it 2 colour, I started looking first at a cheap true 2 colour, which would involve just using the magenta and black rollers of a lithograph. I developed several variations of this, including one with a gradient background, which kind of shows how tints can be used in print; Though it looks greyer and greyer, these obviously aren't an infinite set of individual inks, but a lesser and lesser concentration of black ink on the substrate (in this case paper stock). I think it looks pretty successful and given how small it appears on this blog page, I think it works quite well scaled down, as it would if it was a real corporate logo on a letterhead, coaster, pen etc. etc.