Thursday, August 27

Victorian Punk

Anything, literally anything can be used to make interesting or evocative stationery. Pictured here are old illustrations of hellebore and belladona plants. I situated them on the page and beneath them probably typed out "Fig. 27: Belladona" in some loopy Edwardian font. The impression was to recall an antiquated biology textbook: lacking one, I replicated the effect.

Being that I was into the gothic subculture at the time, and writing to people of like mind, this was an eminently appropriate choice of flora for stationery. These are poisonous plants and bring to mind someone like Lucrezia Borgia or whatever romanticized and insane historical figure. It's the drama, the romanticism I was going for with this project.

It was nothing at all to find suitable woodcuts or illustrations that could be stratified into stark black-and-white imagery for this purpose. With the intention of slicing an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper in half, I would print two images to a page, halve the sheet, and start writing on a document of a less intimidating and demanding size than a full piece of paper, if I should choose. (As it ended up, usually, I would bind four of these smaller pieces of paper together--two sheets in total, writing front and back--so it was nothing more than a psychological palliative.)

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