Both my poster are about climate change and how issues such as deforestation, burning fossil fuels, and

general pollution are affecting the Earths

atmosphere in negative ways.
The coke can poster is mainly about pollution and littering. It consists of a hard fact about the time span it takes for an aluminium can to
decompose (500 years) and then goes on to explain that it we continue to litter and pollute our land then there may be no forests left for trees to
grow and the Forests of the future will consist of plants struggling to grow through the rubbish. The caption is something I came up with myself
and I felt that it adequately illustrated the message I was trying to portray.
The CO2 poster focuses on the larger scale climate change such as deforestation and how too much carbon dioxide can be bad for the atmosphere.
The image itself illustrates how the plants are dying in the C and the 2 (representing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) and the O
(oxygen) remains alive. It signifies how the levels of carbon dioxide are rising and inflicting harm onto living organisms. The caption is meant as a
warning to the viewers about how climate change is an issue that should not be taken lightly but a current issue affecting the world.
Both of the posters incorporated real/live cress, which I had to grow from seeds inside the CO2 cut-outs, and the coke can. The process was lengthy
and it needed serious attention to make sure each letter/ can was getting enough water and sunlight to fully grow.
Once the coke can cress had fully grown I could then proceed to take pictures of it. I set up a large sheet of white card that I could use as the
background and took the pictures at night so that only the white light flash could be seen in the image and not any yellow light from the sun or from
a lamp.
However for the CO2, I had to wait until it was nearly fully grown and then put weed killer on the C and the 2 to kill the cress inside (This took
another 3 days to kill the cress). Once all the photographs had been taken I then proceeded to place them all into Photoshop so that I could erase
the background and get rid of any shadows and then put them onto the poster. Making the poster wasnt physically that challenging it just required
a lot of concentration when trying to place the images perfectly inside the margins. The text was made in Illustrator, to make sure it was the best
quality, and then dragged into Photoshop where I could than place it in the right spot.
My idea continued to develop throughout the devising process and researching period. I began this book by explaining how I wanted to continue
looking at the natural world towards the fine detail in plant photography and possibly work in black and white. But from the beginning I knew I
wanted to create something with a deeper meaning that would be a powerful message. In the early stages of my research my idea developed as I
became fascinated with double exposure and thought that maybe I could portray nature as being part of me. But I soon realised that this idea
wouldnt achieve my goal of creating a deeper meaning by making people think about their actions and consequences of these actions. So I carried
on with my research and realised that maybe I could look at nature campaigns because I knew that they would provide me with a message to
illustrate, and I found it fascinating. I loved how they cleverly used simply images to make you think. As I continued to carry out artist research I still
wanted to keep nature as an aspect of my final piece, so I looked at how nature has been affected by mans interference, which led my to climate
change. As I drew my thumbnail ideas I continued to refer to campaign posters specifically those from WWF; the World Wildlife Fund. Which is why
for my final piece I decided that I had been employed by the company WWF to create a poster for them about climate change. I began down the
route of CO2 because it is a prominent gas found in climate change contributing to the greenhouse gases warming the planet and also acidifying
the oceans. The element of cress was introduced because I wanted to remain linked to nature and somehow incorporate physical nature into my
piece.
There were many difficult elements involved in creating my final pieces;
Trying to grow the cress in the winter. I placed the cress in my conservatory because it was likely to get the most sunlight there but then at night it
would become very cold and I think in some ways that stunted the growth of some of the cress seeds, and meant that it required lots of water to
keep it from drying out in the cold.

Also trying to kill the cress was more difficult than I thought I would be. I used strong weed killer and even bleach to kill the cress off faster, but I
think I was expecting it to look much more yellow, aged and vividly dead than it turned out to be. (So I had to add a few effects in Photoshop to
yellow it slightly). Another problem was accurately erasing the background away from the CO2 and the Coke can in some areas there were little
tiny gaps where the background was showing in between all the tiny cress stems- I did my best to erase them but in some areas if you look really
closely you can still see the background, if I had the chance to do it again I would spend more time erasing every little detail of background. And
finally to get the text in the best quality I had to use illustrator, which Ive never used before, so I had to learn the basic skills of using the text tool
and changing the font and size. Once I got the hang of it, it wasnt a problem.