The vinegar valentine project was over 5 days. I did it over a week and a half due to being busy with work commitments.
I began the project by thinking of people I resented. I chose Gerry Ford, the CEO of Caffe Nero. I chose him because I work for this company. I have seen colleagues in tears, endured racism, and genuine malice from customers. these customers have put in a complaint and received free coffee cards. this demonstrates a lack o care for the company. when my holiday hours were not calculated properly I had 5 hours reduced from 3 pay checks. the company does not check the holiday every time it is put forward. it is checked annually. yet when holiday is underused, the days do not role over to the new financial year, and we lose out on this money. I have been shouted and sworn at by customers, cleaned piss off the floor multiple times, as well as finding needles from heroine addicts in the toilets. I do not think we receive adequate respect from the company for the things we have to deal with. For this reason I chose to do the project on Gerry Ford.
I started by doing a more detailed drawing of him in pencil. I did this because I really really really enjoy doing detailed drawings. It also allows me to get familiar with what I’m drawing. This allowed me to get familiar with Gerry Fords face, making it easier to distort the features when I went to do the caricature. I began to look at individual features, working on distorting them independently before doing portraits. This allowed me to get familiar with the caricature style. I then worked on doing a few caricature portraits, the first one looked nothing like Gerry Ford. I was thinking of changing the public figure to Marilyn Monroe as she is a bit easier to caricature. I then decided to persevere with Gerry Ford as I was more passionate about making him into a caricature.
I started thinking about cupid, as I did want the outcome for this project to be related to valentines day. I also wanted this outcome to be funny. I found the idea of putting my mean bosses head on a fat baby wearing a diaper very funny. i started by doing little drawings of cupid, thinking about composition for how I wanted my cupid to look.
I played around with writing a little poem to go on my caricature.
‘ you are fuelled by greed,
your face turns green,
showing you to be mean,
because your are keen,
to take our money,
you big fat dummy’
I’m not a very good poet, so it wasn’t amazing, but I did like the ending as I do feel it got that humour I wanted. I then began to have another few attempts at turning Gerry ford’s face into a caricature. The drawings did get better and i managed to achieve a small likeness. I do feel a little like a lost that likeness when I created the Gerry Ford cupid caricature. but at the same team, I feel that since I do still work for this company, maybe that’s a good thing. The work does still show a likeness to a capitalist CEO by the angry expression, double chins and receding hairline. This is helped by the poem. I also added little devil horns, tail and black wigs to make it into a devilish cupid, trying to get across that idea of greed.
In the final outcome I decided I wanted it look very pink and pretty and shiny as I associated this with cupid and valentines day. I also felt this would make the piece a little more satirical. I chose to use Pebeo inks and acrylic inks to make the colours vivid. I used glitter to make it a little shinier and eye catching. I added the poem in using black acrylic paint. I feel that it is very hard to read and would have been better done by scanning the image and adding the text on photoshop.
overall the piece is not that clear, I should have added some money imagery into the outcome. While money was mentioned in the poem, I do not feel that this s enough to communicate the message f the work of greed of Large company CEO’s. despite this, I do still like the outcome as I find it quite funny to have my bosses head on a cupid baby with devil horns, combined with the BIG DUMMY text.
