In a nut shell, my idea is to light up the city through out the day from morning right through to the evening with all kinds of lanterns. Bright coloured ones in the morning, lit lanterns as the night draws in & it gets dark. Going off topic during the day but staying on theme with the idea of light, creating tall 3D free standing lettering spelling out ALIGHT in the street that are interactive with the public. They can be climbed on etc for photographs.
Here is my primary research of already existing chinese lanterns, both flying, hanging & floating:
I have been looking into typography & in specific lettering for the word ALIGHT. I have used the book Hand Job for research of different fonts & these are some of the ideas I have come up with:
As you can see, I then went on to looking at how I could cut into the lantern & how the lettering might look if I were to do this.
I decided to use one of my lanterns as a test piece to see how this would work on the actual product:
Whilst cutting into the tissue of the lanterns, it was very difficult to get a neat, straight cut because it was such a fine & delicate material. It also didn't help that the scissors I was using were far to large for the delicate corners of the type.
Once the lettering was cut out, it was clear that this wasn't going to work as I'd originally planned. Due to having to cut out the whole external shape of the letter, it became unclear what the letters were after they were cut out, especially in the case of the letter A and H.
The next big problem with this idea was the fact that once the tissue was cut into, it most likely would not function as a lantern should. once the shape of the lantern was cut into, the heat from the flame that would normally fill the lantern to make it float wold now be lost out of the holes cut into its side. This means that the lantern would no longer have the capability to fly.
After this I decided to look into how I could use the material of the lantern to create an image, illustration or some sort of typography on. My tutor pointed me in the direction of poetry rather than the factual & some what in-your-face idea of writing ALIGHT straight onto the lantern.
I found two poems that had some relevance to light:
This is a verse taken from a poem by A. E (George William Russell)
This quote is taken from the poem "Daylight" written by Itumeleng Adams and is my preferred piece of poetry. It talks about darkness & flames which are both embodied in the idea of my project. I used ink to paint this sentence onto the side of a lantern just to see how it would react with the material & how its overall look would or could shape the lantern.
This was just a first practice to see how it would work out. I now need to refine my idea & decide upon a type face to use & how to position the lettering.
Going off on a slight tangent, but still thinking about light I have been playing around with the shutter speed on my camera & photographing lights at night:
I've gone back to the quote from the poem by Itumeleng Adams & I've been doing more research into the typography I could use for this piece of writing.
This was a random Alight logo I came up with whilst researching different typographical approaches to the lettering.
This last image is using the same ink I used to paint onto the tissue of the lantern.
