History of the Ouija Board

No demons were summoned in the making of this poster

My timehop recently reminded me that's been about a year since I finished this poster so I thought I'd share with you guys the process behind this piece.

Let me take you down memory lane, back to my days at The School of Visual Arts. It was one of my favorite classes taught by the amazing Lauren Weinstein and it was the last assignment before the final. We had to make a large form comic, 24"x32" to be exact, and while I generally always have ideas of what I want to work on, for this project I was stumped.

Halloween had just passed so I was missing the joy of being bombarded by spooky content 24/7. I had been an avid podcast listener because 1) I'm a nerd and 2) it's the perfect thing to listen to when you're making art and all the podcasts I listen to are either about folklore/urban legends, history, or true crime. So knowing that I wanted to do something in that realm, I still was not feeling that usual spark of inspiration. But the class was near ending and we had to have a least one sketch to present to the teacher so I drew up a half-assed composition about the legend of the Bunny Man. It's a crazy enough urban legend to be an interesting subject matter but I was not inspired enough to come up with an intriguing way to tell the story.

Jump forward about a week and it was almost time for that class again. Knowing me and my habit to leave things to the absolute last minute, it was probably the night before that class and I still had not really settled on what I wanted to do. I feel I am most inspired at night so I was mulling over what I could possibly do when I remembered an episode about the origins of the Ouija board that Just A Story Podcast had put out.

Now, most people would be concerned if they suddenly awoke around 3am with thoughts of ouija boards but I was thrilled. I ran to my desk and did that super cliched thing that you think artists only do in movies; as quickly as I could I sketched out my idea, by the light of my iPhone, exactly as it was in my head. The history of the Ouija board! It all just clicked and I was super excited to show my idea off.

When I presented my sketch to my teacher, I received her seal of approval and thus began the journey...

The Design

I knew I wanted to use the layout of the Ouija board for the composition of the page. That was the easy part. We'll get to the hard part in a bit.

This lovely little (actually it was quite large) drawing above was the basic layout of the page that I whipped up in Photoshop; my plan was to use this as a guideline and use a lightbox to draw the actual artwork on top. My hand lettering has never been strong, so I used a computer font so that I could lightbox it that way my lettering would look nice while still having the imperfections and natural look of actually drawing it by hand.

I printed this in the printing lab at full size and it was a little embarrassing; I remember trying to be really nonchalant about printing this 24"x32" piece of paper not wanting people to think this was my actual work.

One change from my original idea was the black area around the center of the drawing. I intended it to just be filled in black but Lauren advised that my illustration about the Ouija could be a little bit more spiritual so I came up with the idea of taking that space to add in some ghost-like figures.

The Hard Part

The biggest obstacle to overcome with this project was the text. Trying to get the words right seemed to be a reoccurring theme in this class and I spent a lot of time choosing my words oh so carefully so they perfectly complemented the images.

A big issue with comics is the wording. I always wanted to say so much but when you are working with a visual medium, the pictures should do most of the talking and the words should really just compliment the artwork. Especially in this particular piece where there was a very limited space for the copy, picking the right way to say the information I wanted to get across took a lot of time and rewrites.

Working on the comic in my studio

I worked in a sepia-toned ink wash to give the piece a real vintage vibe. Then once it was all drawn and painted, I took it into Photoshop and tweaked some things. I added the black border and changed some of my hand-lettering to a font.

I think this project took about 3 weeks to complete, maybe 4.

After it was all done I reached out to the creators of Just A Story Podcast and told them of how they inspired me with their amazing show. They were kind enough to feature my art on their website. You can check out the episode that inspired me here and you might as well just listen to the rest of their content as they really do an amazing job of talking about urban legends and the history/psychology behind them.

And that's all she wrote

Thank you for taking the time to read this till the end and I'm curious to see what podcasts you guys are listening to!

If you'd like to keep up with more of my work you can check me out at the following:

Instagram: @la.fumettista
Tumblr: http://la-fumettista.tumblr.com/tagged/art
Twitter: @TheresaChiechi
Website: https://www.theresachiechi.com/

Until next time 👋