Trying out the style of Laughing Mule's work - 19/10/2022

Trying out the style of Laughing Mule's work

Daisy Jackson / 19/10/2022

As my main intention is to use my cricut machine for this project, I decided to try out the style of Laughing Mule but through cricut and not linocut - their main medium.

I wanted to capture the relationship between Joey and Topthorn in a style similar to Laughing Mule. Laughing Mule often focuses on positive and negative space in their work as well as zoom ins on particular features of horses - I wanted to replicate this in my own way.

Here are my drawings I created in Procreate:

The first drawing is a different position of the two horse noses. The second and third drawings go together which I will experiment through adding two different vinyls on one shirt/card.

With these pieces, my main intention was to transfer them both onto cards. However, I realised the only vinyl I currently have (until the weekend) is smart iron on vinyl which is only used for materials. This is no issue as I can still test out the designs.

Due to cotton shirts not working, when experimenting with linocut a while ago, I used an old Adidas T-shirt that I had made out of recycled polyester. This absorbed the linocut ink very well so I assumed the same would happen for this.

When printing however, I realised I removed the wrong part of the background. Unfortunately when I noticed this, it was already cutting. No issue though, I can still experiment with this.

Here is the finished product using one of the two designs I have:

It worked very well! The polyester absorbed the vinyl ink extremely well and there was no issues!

A part of the design is still pulling up but this could have easily been avoided when flattening the image more - I now know this for next time. 

My next experiment will be with the other two images either on this shirt I have or at the weekend when I will be purchasing a variety of polyester T-shirts (hopefully). 

This gives me so much hope for the project as the process is very simple. I love the design I made as it communicates love between two animals in the way I wanted. In this case, Topthorn and Joey. It has it's own strange style inspired by Laughing Mule.

20/10/2022

My second try out:

After this, I tried out two different colours of vinyl and applied them via Cricut onto a T-shirt. 

Here are the results:

Despite making sure that the measurements were both 14cm x 14cm, the second layer of vinyl (the blue) did not allign properly for some reason. However, this did not stop me from applying the layer as I still wanted to see if the appearane was visually pleasing.

I do love the contrast between the two colours and think that it is a nice style. I love the details involved and think it looks complimentary to the T-shirt being a square shape.

Of course I acknowledge that I will have to improve on my measurements in the future so this will probably be a trial and error. I also feel like this design would be great for a print or card (which was the original intention before realising that the vinyl I had was smart iron on rather than permanent).

What is my action plan now?

Because I want to base my work on humour, I think a good starting point now would be to try out the style of Gemma Correll but in my own way. I will rewatch/read parts of Warhorse and note down key quotes that I like as well as storylines. This way I can generate funny ideas to add onto a card/T-shirt. I could even do tote bags to spread the cost. After this, I will do character sheets and have a continuous horse character (Joey) throughout all my work. This can then be sold as prints and so on.