Christiana Couceiro – Ella Wilson

DRB1: Modern retro collage and Christiana Couceiro

Christiana Couceiro Work

Christiana Couceiro is an editorial illustrator who uses modern collage and abstract shapes in conjunction with retro images to construct stories through her designs. Most of her pieces consist of a simple colour palate which heavily features red as well as splashes of blue, yellow, and green. I believe this is effective as the primary colours contrast highly against the vintage black and white images and make them stand out more. All the main images that are used are very crisp and high quality which creates a stark difference between that and the very bleak off-white backgrounds which makes it more of a statement. Christiana also includes a lot of elements from the Bauhaus art with the abstract, angular, geometric shapes with little ornamentation style which was featured a lot in modern retro collage.

She collects her image sources through regularly attending flea markets and “collects other people’s memories to make a new one”. She does this by sorting through record covers, Canadian logos, 1960s paperback books, Latvian magazines and Swiss posters and reutilising them in a different context and giving them more meaning.

Her designs also include a range of motion and are often featuring someone/something doing an action, for example this design highlights Simone Biles in the middle of a jump with the blue and the red making her stand out. They also include a lot of freestyle strokes that look as if they’ve just been written on top which adds more character to the piece as it creates more dimension. Her use of different digital mediums in these pieces also make them look more visually appealing as it makes them look as if they’ve been graffitied over and could add more context and meaning to the piece. For example her almost propaganda-like design featuring Joe Biden where she states her political views and beliefs in the handwritten text. The way she makes use of famous figures in today’s media within her designs makes her seem more anarchistic with her bold statements that she makes through her art as not everyone will agree with it and makes it less appealing to certain groups of people.
The sizing of the main images throughout her work also remains to be quite consistent with a couple or more figures ordered in the centre of the page around one another to create an effective composition.

My Own Re-designs

For my redesigns of her work I wanted to emulate the types of main images she used by also choosing to incorporate portraits/full body images of well-known people and celebrities in black and white. I used appropriate text that related to the image/theme of the piece and used a hand-drawn typography as a lot of Christiana’s designs have a free-hand element to them. This gave it a more disordered and careless look to it, almost as if it had been done out of anger and frustration as it had been done so quickly. Despite it looking random I thought carefully regarding the hierarchy of the text so that it wouldn’t overwhelm the whole piece and distract the viewer from the other elements. The seemingly “random” lines in my redesigns work around the main images to add a more disorderly look to the otherwise very Bauhaus feel to the designs. This pairs nicely with her sometimes more intense themes and important messages she uses in her work to make it look slightly less “pristine”.

Christiana uses a lot of full non-blurred drop shadows behind her figures which make them stand out more, so I decided to do the same which contrasted nicely against the solid block colour behind it. And if there are more than 2 figures, they are often either facing each other or facing away (rather than in the same direction) I think this works well compositionally as it balances it out well and doesn’t look as if the full image has been cut off and there’s still parts of the piece left to be seen.

After looking at her work I also saw she incorporated a lot of feminist ideology into her work by including inspiration women in history as well as women of colour and designing them in a way to highlight their accomplishments. I did the same by focusing one of the redesigns around Lindsey Stirling – someone who I admired growing up.

References

1) Christiana Couceiro (N/A) Simone Biles [Poster] N/A. Available Online: https://cristianacouceiro.com/ [Accessed 08/05/23]

2) Christiana Couceiro (N/A) Hand Written [Poster] N/A. Available Online: https://cristianacouceiro.com/ [Accessed 08/05/23]

3) Christiana Couceiro (N/A) Walking [Poster] N/A. Available Online: https://cristianacouceiro.com/ [Accessed 08/05/23]

4) Christiana Couceiro (N/A) Joe Biden [Poster] N/A Available Online: https://cristianacouceiro.com/ [Accessed 08/05/23]