Wider view

“Huge and heavy” - that’s what you feel when you get in touch with this sketchbook that collects loads of experimental photographic images. The high contrast images on the top of both aluminium covers were screenprinted with a coating emulsion and then corroded by acid. This pair of images are the positive and negative (in very high contrast) from a digital picture of a common hot water bottle - which symbolically represents the cold of English winter. The black spine was made by a very good leather and a sheet of canvas in the inner side. The pages were bound to the spine with one piece of 7 meter long waxed thread. The main paper is a quite cheap one, called “bread and butter”, commonly used by artists during etching process due its very good resistance to water. Some pages were printed on heavy watercolour paper or light sensitive ones. I hope to post some photos of the pages on a later occasion, showing the techniques and details about the process.

Details of the spine. There are 240 holes here and the amount of pages exceeds 200.

Back cover in which you can see the negative image of the hot water bottle. The dark tones were caused by the acid corrosion process.

It basically consisted in these techniques: colour and saturation controls for each part of the flower, adding some new petals and removing other parts (if you compare the images you can easly find them), some advanced sharpen, contrast controls for each range of lightness and saturation in the image, some noise and oriented surface textures that are best seen in the last image.

Original image

Intermediate step

Detail

Can you see the “extra” petal in this zoomed in image?

The London Paper - image 1 and The London Paper - image 2

Snowman’s postcard. It was so cold that I lent my green scarf to the snowman for a couple of hours.

The snowman designers: Camillo (left) and Dave (right).

The first “head” was not so cool, but very funny!

The beginning of the process.

More photos.

The next images are seen in negative mode, due to be contact-printed in alternative cameraless processes at a later time.

Magazine flower 1

Magazine flower 2

Malbec the France is a French wine from Cahors, specially elaborated for the South American Wine market. The label carries classical elements of traditional French wines as the Moulain and the Lis Flower, while some other aspects as colors and tipography bring joviality to it.

The Cabernet Sauvignon from Villaggio Grando is elaborated from a very special selection of varietal, cultivated in cold lands at the very south of Brazil, in Santa Catarina. It brings the pheasant on its face, a very representative cultural element from the region where it comes from. Main typography is made by golden hot-stamping.

All the 37 pictures from the filmstrip were printed randomly over the whole sketchbook. They were taken in a restricted area in Holborn, London, around the building of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. Also the time was restricted, which was around 45 minutes. For 37 photographs it means an average of 73 seconds for finding and shooting the subject of each picture. The film was manually processed (Fujifilm Neopan 400).

The sketchbook was made in a very well defined window of time. It took around 16 hours divided into 3 days. The pictures were taken in the first day, and then all the paper was propperly cut and folded into sections to be prepared with liquid light. After some tests into the darkroom, I could “calibrate” each picture to its right exposure. In the second day I exposed all the lasting pages, made all the photographic process with developer and fixer and its rinses/whashes. Then I hung up all the pages to let them dry.

The final step consisted in binding the sketchbook, which took around 6 hours. It was made with natural leather and black waxed thread, as seen in the picture above.

details

The coloured stripes use “Brazilian colours” as main palette. The halftone image is used to dissolve dark into high tones, transforming the coloured stripes into Villa-Lobos portrait, leaving the paper itself as pure light. The typography is based on Helvetica’s Ultra Light stencil version, which I designed for this poster. The name pops from the bottom to the top direction, through several semi-transparent steps, besides a very representative paragraph about his composition style and creative processes.

The vector based images represent the new areas that were included in the scope of 29th’s edition, acoustic bass and brass orchestra. The two figures are important composers, specially awarded on this poster. The lower face is Christopher Gluck, an opera composer, and the higher face is Heitor Villa-Lobos, *the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music (*extracted from wikipedia.org). All the small rounded symbols are musical characters.

The 30th edition came to place a mark on the posters trajectory, breaking with all the visuals created since then. Concept: the 30th edition could only happen after all the other 29 repetitions of the course, during several sequential years. Its concept is based on the repetition of the festival’s name (Curso Internacional de Verão) through all the background area, sharing a coloured gradient that represents changing, passage. The big centralized number 30 brings a strobo composition made by very thin strokes, which represents rhythm, movement and repetition.

Concept: Photoimage is strongly related to the transformation of digital pixels into printed dots. When going to press, all digital imagery from design studios and agencies are ripped, a process in which the pixels became virtually printable dots. This main idea leads the hole concept of the project.

To reinforce the technical aspects related to Photoimage’s main activity, the construction grid is very precise and geometric.

See below some stationery designed for Photoimage.

Business cards.

Letterhead.

Envelope.

This corporate identity project includes:
Logo Redesign and its Corporate Identity Manual;
Business cards;
Envelopes;
Letterhead;
T-shirts;
CD’s labels / packs and some more items.

Sequence of burned pages of sketchbook.

Detail.

The typographic image was created by the meeting of parallel lines that are a bit illegible when alone. But together they complete each other’s shapes and become perfectly legible.

Find bellow both illustration and flyer.

as you can see, the old blog’s gone. New content will often be added to the new blog.
To understand what’s going on, visit the ABOUT content. Some old pictures can be found at the links below. Here we go.

Some Old Pictures
xLDFx | Special

Hope to see you again. Enjoy the new content!

Camillo Righini

Detail.