So, since the results of Flower Design Award has been shared at Japan Design Week official website, I have no more reasons not to post my own project! Even though it was not the choosen one, I had lots of fun creating it, so I've been restraining myself really hard from post it!
From the
competition page here comes the theme and a bit of background, before I explain my project:
Designboom in collaboration with MATSUYAMA DESIGN WEEK: Participation is open to professionals, students and design enthusiasts from every country in the world.
Theme : FLOWER
Through the flower design award, MATSUYAMA DESIGN WEEK seeks new ideas to promote the city of Matsuyama on a global scale. Submissions can be presented through any design discipline including, art, product, graphic design, and film under the theme of the flower.
Background: Matsuyama is the largest city on Shikoku, an island located in southwest Japan. It has developed around the Matsuyama castle and is best known for dogo onsen, one of the country’s oldest hot spring resorts. Famed for its literature, Matsuyama is the hometown of famous Haiku poet Masaoka Shiki and great writer Natsume Sōseki. In recent years, it has developed a dense urban fabric and now looks to disseminate creativity both inside and outside of the city’s boundaries.
Matsuyama is also known for the flower camellia, which is symbol of the city. So my intention was to put the literature into flowers. In an ideal world, I'd love to quote the city's writers and to create patterns with their texts, but - obviously - there are many copyright issues around it and would only work through a patternship...
Having in mind that the idea would be to promote the city, instead of using the works of literature, I create a pattern with "Matsuyama City"/ "松山市" - something really basic, but that would work to remind people about the place, since the pattern would be applied in a product. It was thought to look like if it was written/drawn with a black marker, so no fancy calligraphy here - easy to read, without having to think much.
Bringing more references, Hisui Sugiura was a great japanese designer, also from Matsuyama. And he created many illustrations about flower. And since flower is a keyword (theme of the award, important symbol of the city and theme of work of many professionals) I decided to reimagine a flower (not exactly a camellia though) using my own style: paper art (to the ones who don't know me, I create paper jewelry from watercolor paper).
So, the Matsuyama pattern became sort of a lace of words. This lace went by a laser cut process to take the shape of petals. The width of the kanji strokes is 1mm. - as usual for my projects, here we have water color paper.
Then I started to work the petals to shape the flower. Looking to the pictures, maybe one can't get it, but this is a veeeery handcraft kind of project. Even though it's laser cut - there are tests before finding the right speed and power for every kind of paper and it's necessary to stop the cutting process every time a pice of paper flies... if it stays under or over the main piece, the work can be lost. And during these stops, if the main piece moves a little bit....bye bye as well... waste of time (it takes a good while) and waste of material.
Can you see a flower taking shape here? ♥ Remembering that these strokes are 1mm width, they get even more fragile while wet - another reason why it's totally handcraft, but it's still the best way to give a organic touch to the paper without ugly marks.
Above: pictures after the main flower structure was dry. After a first layer of metallic pigment. Not finished yet...
A couple in layers later... It actually could be just some decorative piece to stay over one's desk but we've been taking about books...
Books, books, books? Anyone? Yup, a bookmark, kids! With a pearl in the center of the flower and a wood stick to mark a page. - btw, what a lovely sunny day! ♥ It's winter here though.
A bookmark is something we always need but not always have it near - then we use a napkin, a piece of paper lost anywhere, a pen, paper clips (dooooooooooon't do it! stop! really, it damages the paper if you forget it there)... Once I saw a friend marking a page with another book inside and I got totally WHT! But, of course, this one could be inside a vase alone, or with many other flower bookmarks, in someone's hair or anywhere instead of inside a book, so it would be a good gift to give someone - the possibilities are infinite. And you would always remember Matsuyama city, because there is the name of the city in the lace patter, because - like the books - it's made of paper and had art in form of text and because it's a flower! ♥
