Reflecting on Halfland Posters

Starting to sketch up concepts for Halfland's posters and other collateral materials.

My dream of creating ambigram lettering of sorts for the logo titles for the project began in earnest yesterday when I came across artist Rowena Murillo's profile photo at random (lower right). She had a school logo on her shirt and that got me thinking about making Halfland's lettering reflect in a mirror.

Wikipedia on a search turned me onto the beautiful rorschach ambigram paintings (a couple bottom center) by John Langdon that I roughed onto her shirt. I found that there were automatic ambigram generators online and that the very best, based on my results was Flip Script. I'm still refining what raw ambigram I'll use, but when I do, I plan to purchase the high res art to use as the basis for the rest I'll do to it from that site. So far, I've used screen grabs of the various free previews, edited their positions and added insect and human artifacts to them letter forms (above).

Here's the thing, ambigrams, a term I hadn't known before yesterday, generally read the same at 180º angles, right side up and upside down. I wanted the lettering to read when reflected in the mirror, yes, but not just that. It really also needs to be somewhat communicative without the use of a mirror, viewing right side up. So my results below are very satisfying for me. They do the trick for me.

I have since gone back to the Flipscript generator and tried all sorts of approaches to trick the code into giving me lettering that will read as "Halfland" when viewed from every direction with a mirror. Somehow I cracked the code and did it. So those results may show up in t-shirts or other items.

But in the meanwhile, I completely enjoyed experimenting with various project imagery to begin to see the world being created coming together at long last...

Some of my favorite 1/2L images are the underwater shots of the Koi of Enlightenment. Here I've paired one of them (liking how my hand is visible with it) with some of the layered painted clouds and cyc sky.

Here's a rather dark and strange collage of the character Tarn and two distinct landscapes representing her two aspects, the moon at night and the healing desert, with a vertical lettering treatment.

Bosq the Snoring Cat dreams a languid dream of Halfland as if submerged in the smeared syrup of sleeping.


PS: If you happen to have a mirror nearby you, try holding it up to the screen, either above or below any of these sketches lettering horizon lines. If you wait a moment your brain should find the language pattern in the lettering and reveal the name of our secret place anyway you reflect on it.