The KISS in Digital Art

Digital Art in my first term at university focused on creating a poster for the Royal Opera House Design Challenge 2019/2020. The brief was to create a poster to promote Giacomo Puccini’s tragic opera, La bohème, to young people between the ages of 14 and 19 years old visiting the opera for the first time. Based on a book by Henri Murger, Puccini’s opera tells the love story between Mimi, a seamstress, and Rodolfo, a poet, and the poverty they endured with their friends and fellow artisans in 19th century Paris.

Lessons included watching the dramatic 2008 film version of La bohème, directed by Robert Dornhelm, starring Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón as Mimi and Rodolfo, and discussions about the key plot points and social issues of the story. Experimenting with Kandinsky Art, a kind of automatic free flow art produced from listening to excerpts of music from the opera, was another lesson to encourage new ways of creating artwork. Tasks were set, from researching the story to poster art, looking at colour and what makes an effective poster. During the process, recreating a Geisha in a Japanese scene was my first introduction to Adobe Photoshop. Creating layers and effects, was a huge challenge for someone who had never used the software or a Mac computer, before.

After much deliberation, Director’s Vision #2 was the option which gave me the most inspirational thoughts to follow:

“La bohème is first and foremost a story about and for young people. I want to find a new way to tell its story, a way that makes it relevant to a young audience today, challenges stereotypes about opera, and avoids it feeling like a ‘museum piece’. Choose any period or setting to achieve this, but be careful not to compromise the words or the music.”

The vision highlighted the main elements of the design challenge’s brief, that La bohème was “a story about and for young people”, and bearing in mind that the director wanted to find a new way to tell the story without compromising the words, or music, the vision echoed the simplicity of much of the silhouette and linear artwork found, and liked, in my poster research. The aim was then to create a poster which wasn’t gender specific, to allow for the story to be told in a new way, with a possible alternative and diverse casting format. A design with 2 faces in a linear design, using ribbons and embroidery thread to create texture, didn’t work too well, so was abandoned. Going back to basics, and a Keep It Simple, Serena, approach with the emphasis on the simplicity of a romantic kiss and the “on a shoestring” phrase, meaning a tight budget or very little money, a simple pair of lips hanging on a string was the culmination of an inspired artistic vision.

The lips, hand drawn in black marker pen, printed on red card; cut out and hung from a black piece of embroidery thread. The artwork then scanned onto a white background, with the red lips matched to the Royal Opera House’s brand colour palette and crudely drawn black outline on the lips toned down in Photoshop. The final artwork embedded in a template on Adobe’s InDesign.

Love at any age can be a balancing act, hanging on the loosest of threads.