Why use this Chairman mao printing idea?
I want to try reflect china culture as a whole by using Chaiman Mao as the main icon to reflect what has changed since the victory of the China cultural revolution. When I am in China I see so much that has changed right in front of my eyes compared to the old style kung fu movies and it always keeps on surprising me to how rapidly the culture changes. So in respect to chairman mao, I wanted to change his appearance in a way that it is reflecting how the people of China treat modern society compared to the old days of chairman mao.
How will I be able to pursue this printing idea?
I have managed to look online for an authenticated look alike of Chairman mao using Google and managed to see one that was either a painted version of him or a smudged photograph of him. I decided that I wanted to change all of that entirely to make my own version of his expressionism myself by using photoshop.
So I began cutting out piece by piece, ‘a bit like a puzzle’ so to speak, and just by using this cutting tool in photoshop enabled me to carefully cutting out all of these different layers. I started cutting out the first layer which was the background, then I done the black outlines of his face, hat and body which will be the last layer to put on, then after that I just cut out the rest of the other parts of his body.
In the end, you get all of these nice layers of his face and body and this give me the great opportunity to using whatever colour that pleases me.
How will I be able to print these different layers out successfully?
Well… The trickiest part of the process of making this image is actually doing the photo emulsion phase. If people say its tricky enough trying to cut layers of an image in photoshop then you are wrong but only if you do not already know how to use photoshop. The most tricky part is projecting them using a light onto photo emulsion and then finally making the image onto silkscreen and this will indeed be the most tricky of all.
The reason why this will be the most tricky is because you have to get the right amount of photo emulsion on the silkscreen first if you are hoping that the image will show up on the silkscreen. another tricky phase is washing the remains of the photo emulsion off carefully making sure you do not rub off a part of the image as well. the rest after that is pretty much guaranteed to work out as I already know how to align the different layers carefully to make the different colours on the image of Chairman mao.
