Graffiti Project

The idea for my stencil really came from this video. I spent a lot of time thinking about what problem I would like to address and I just stumbled upon that parody and I thought it was hilarious. It might not be as 'serious' as I would have liked but I think it is still important and relevant because 'Twilight' is such a cultural phenomenon today and teens AND adults go bonkers over it. I have to admit that I was curious so I read the book and watched t he movie and both fell flat in my opinion. On the other hand I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I realized that the missing component is humor. Buffy had a self-effacing humor about it that made the angst easier to stomach while Twilight just takes itself and its angst way to seriously. The fans, in my opinion, take it to seriously too. Thus I wanted to incorporate humor into my shirt.

For the picture I really decided to go with flipping the traditional picture of the girl being ravished or attacked by a vampire so I wanted a picture of a girl about to stake a man. I spent a good couple hours on the internet looking for a picture that I could make into a stencil and since I couldn't find one I decided to sort of compose my own. I imaged searched a cowering man and then searched something like 'aggressive girl' I found two pictures that I felt I could use-one was of a cowering business man and the other of a really aggressive looking girl softball player. I used the online image editing app at pixlr.com and put the pictures together, adjusting the size to make the girl a bit bigger and changing the contrast and brightness as well as saturation to make good stencil material. I printed out my picture which looked like this:



I made the necessary adjustments with pencil like adding a cape for my vamp and deciding where to cut.


Cutting out the stencils was really the most time consuming part and it took hours, especially the words which I had in a Buffy font.


It lead to some casualty...

I think the finished project looked great:



In terms of the words I really was stumped about what to do because I knew I wanted it to be clever but not too long as to avoid having to cut out all those words. I came up with 'Angsty Vampires (can't) suck!' I don't know if it's really that clever but my roommate thought it was funny. With the picture and text together I was really aiming at a specific fan audience, I guess the one that likes to wear t-shirts that say 'BITE ME EDWARD' on them. I guess the message is to lighten up.

In terms of environment or audience, as I just stated, I would be aiming at sort of a Twilight audience since it is such a big force really in pop culture today. I put my graffiti on a t-shirt because it is in someways more commercial and spreadable than putting it on a wall. I guess since twilight is such a commercial franchise I would be putting my message in a similar medium. T-shirts are also something that you can wear to specific places and venues, so while putting your message up on a wall might have a lot of people see it, the lack of context might confuse them but to wear it on a t-shirt to maybe a gathering of twilight fans or something would definitely get the message across.