full.fill

It's summer officially with the calendar page flipped to 1st of May, and Perch Project finally has its poster up on the site encouraging people to share a bowl of water and some grains for the birds. I think we don't even need to wait for May to realise how hot it is outside already. Birds feel the pinch of it especially, to help them we did a DIY on making a bird feeder using plastic bottle and tetra packs, you can see it over here. The poster followed the DIY post with the hope of people spreading the word around. 

Now, a bit about the making of the poster - from the very beginning, we were very inspired by the work of Charley Harper, his approach to simplification and construction of a complex visual with simple shapes intrigued us. I think we tried to borrow that sense of simplicity in our poster, the idea was to create the form of a drop with tied up shapes of different birds. The process started with sketching out a rough placement of elements that would come together, and then shredding down those elements to its basic beautiful form. The treatment had to be uniform for all the elements, yet communicate the species of birds we worked on. Here are some of the sketches that went into the simplification process. 

Once the shape of birds came on the artwork, we filled the empty spaces with elements that are associated with birds, for example - the fruits they eat or the flower they suck the nectar from etc. After putting together the elements, we contemplated on whether to fill in the elements with solid colours, but just the plain strokes communicated the form of a drop better. Here's a trial version of the one done with fills.

After long chain of emails, we finally churned out the poster just in time. You can see the poster on Perch here. If you feel like sharing it - You can use the high resolution file from this link.  

Please keep a bowl of water out for the birds, this tiny effort would do them a lot of good. I have one out near my window for the squirrels, it's such a joy to see them come and quench their thirst.