Typography Stencils

In todays workshop we made stencils from existing fonts to create patterns using paint. The aim of the task was to take inspiration from the existing shapes that made up the form of the letters draw them randomly onto a large piece of paper and cut them out using a craft knife. 

I didn't follow any particular theme when choosing which shapes to draw and cut as I didn't want to limit and construct the possibilities of the end pieces. I got a range of shapes from squared lines to curves, I even combined shapes to make hybrids that would give a combination of effects when printed. 

When it came to printing I firstly used the stencil I created from each font to make a piece of work so that you could clearly see the correlation and transition of ideas through both pieces of work. I decided with the prints I was going to go very abstract and random but with repetition. I quite like the effect a kaleidoscope has when you look through it. Printing with paint was messy and it was hard to get the nice crisp lines that usually i prefer to work with however the randomness and the bleeding that the paint gave when the stencil slipped gave a really nice effect. It was almost a self gradient as the paint slid across the paper and ran out of pigment.

I have documented above all my outcomes and the larger collection was a few from my class mates, it was inspiring to see how other people interpreted the task and how their outcomes can differ even though we were all asked to do the same thing. As a task I think this would be a really good way of generation ideas for iconography and logos, you could combine shapes that you want to use and see if you could generate something a little bit more abstract. Using this would enable you to make something a little bit more bespoke rather than beginning the design process on illustrator or photoshop for example.