sticker art project
In one of the art classes that I am currently taking, we were assigned to make art that would circulate outside of the art department and see how people react to our art. The assignment is very open ended and I decided to design stickers as my medium. Stickers, as opposed to flyers or posters, have a longer life, people are less opposed to throwing them out and feel more inclined to stick them on one of their belongings, in result, circulating your art.
Some of my classmates really wanted to take an activist's approach to this assignment and focus on events or liberal concepts. I wanted to also focus on these things, but on such a "scratching the surface" level, where many people could relate or get interested, without feeling out of the loop or overwhelmed if they didn't know the subject. Please keep in mind that in order to design something that a wide range of people would feel attracted to, I had to design something more "kitschy" and "trendy".
I ended up designing two stickers for this project. The first one focuses on spreading self-love. First I did several drafts of the water color background. I chose water colors because they create a very calming look that is both soft yet interesting, perfect for a background. I wanted the background of this particular sticker to mimic "cotton candy clouds", an iconic sight that resonates and calms a lot of people. After creating a water color background that I like, I scanned a high res image of it and cropped the section that I like. I then imported the image into Adobe Lightroom and adjusted the exposure as well as lessened the clarity to give it a softer look. I then imported the newly edited image into Photoshop and using fonts imported from Adobe Texts, created the text layer with the saying "You look great today", a simple yet sincere message.
The next sticker I designed focuses on intersectionality, a topic/concept that is very important to me. During a conversation with a friend, she told me that a lot of people that she has interacted with has acted like intersectionality is not relevant in today's society, making it seem like it is a dirty word. I then decided to do a play on words on the popular phrase, "Talk dirty to me." in hopes of sparking dialogue on intersectionality. Again, I went with a water color background, this time getting inspiration from a rainbow or the LBGTQ+ flag. I struggled a lot with designing this sticker. For a while, I only knew what I wanted it to say and what font it should be in. When I was first brainstorming, I thought that I wanted to incorporate group's symbols such as BLM and LBGTQ+, but I was worried that it would be too close to resembling the "Coexists" logo, aka something on the back of a middle-aged-birkenstocks w/socks wearing-white man's 1990s volvo or subaru or something of that nature, which is not really the aesthetic I'm going for here. So in the end, artist's block won, and I decided to just go along with the water color theme, make it more cohesive with the other sticker, and make a water color rainbow.
