Rio de Janeiro | Outside The Lines

What do you call a graphic artist who does not need a computer?

A typewriter artist.

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Álvaro Franca is often called a graphic designer but may be better known as a typographer or type designer. He creates fonts.

What is your favorite font? You might use Calibri, Arial, Tahoma, or Times New Roman. Franca develops fonts that are seen online and in print. He has developed fonts for reading purposes and as parts of advertisements. He even designed labels for beer bottles.

Franca uses a computer to craft font types, but it is what he creates with a vintage typewriter that makes the 22-year-old artist most impressive.

In a collection of work titled, Typewritten Portraits, Franca creates portraits by using a vintage typewriter to strategically placing single characters on a blank sheet of paper. To deepen the complexity of his work, he defines, shapes, and shades the faces of infamous authors so they are recognizable and, in some cases, may be mistaken for sketch art.

The method for creating Typewritten Portraits was conceptualized by Franca in 2013. While he might be the first person to use a typewriter to recreate portraits of Jose Saramago, Charles H. Bukowski, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, and Clarice Lispector, he was not the first artist to use a vintage typewriter as an art medium.

In 2012, Segmation wrote a blog about vintage typewriter collector and artist Keira Rathbone. Rathbone lives in London and uses over 30 typewriters to create original works of art.

While both artists use typewriters, Franca and Rathbone have contrasting approaches to creating art. Using his computer, Franca created a method that allows him to know exactly where to put characters on a typewriter page. For instance, from the start, he maps out where to add the letter “m,” which is the character he uses to add depth and dimension to portraits.

Rathbone, on the other hand, does not sketch or outline any of her art. With a well-trained eye, she is able to create scenes from her imagination and recreate images she sees. By going over parts of a picture multiple times she produces the perfect amount of shading. This gives her images the level of depth and dimension that Franca factors in from the start.

These two artists live a world apart but both use typewriters to create masterpieces. Rathbone truly needs no computer while Franca uses his for precision. Watch the artists at work and let us know which approach you like better. Leave us a comment at the bottom of this page.

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/90642350″>Typewritten Portraits</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/alvarofranca”>Álvaro Franca</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>

Read more Segmation blog posts about art and color:

Retire in Style with Artistic Flair

Childhood Stories of Paint by Number

How to turn your Passion into Profit

Be an Artist in 2 minutes with Segmation SegPlay® PC (see more details here)

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Street Painting in Washington, DC

Look around you. The buildings, the streets, the trees – they all look pretty much the same, day after day, don’t they? So much so, that you probably got to the point where you don’t really notice your surroundings anymore, other than to get from Point A to Point B, or to admire an occasional flower or sunset.

What would happen if someone painted multicolored stripes across the street you take every day to work? Imagine how much that would change your perception of the street and alter your day to day reality. Color has the power to lift you into another world, and take you beyond the ordinary. Many artists are utilizing this power to transform our everyday surroundings so that we see our own familiar spaces in a new light.

Here are three examples of how color can transform space:

In the image above, artist Mokha Laget, in conjuction with the Corcoran and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, recreated a striped street painting that she originally created 20 years earlier on 8th St. NW in downtown Washington DC. The painted stripes are an homage to former Corcoran professor and noted color field artist, Gene Davis, who died of a heart attack in 1985. The bright colors enliven the street, bringing a sense of wonder and whimsicality to the US capital.

Rio de Janeiro, capital of Brazil, is a city with striking disparities between the rich and the poor. Twenty percent of Rio’s inhabitants live in densely populated favelas that crowd the hillsides overlooking the capital’s more wealthy residents. The ‘O Morro’ Favela Painting project is an attempt to bring color and culture to the impoverished community, injecting vitality and pride into an otherwise depressed area rife with social issues. The Favela Project is employing favela residents to paint their houses in specific, carefully-designed patterns that when finished, will be a display of beauty and color visible from the center of Rio.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, famous for “wrapping” buildings, bridges and entire islands, once again soared into the spotlight in 2005 with their “Gates” installation in New York City’s Central Park. For 15 days in February 2005, 7,503 vinyl saffron-colored gates rising 5 meters into the air were displayed along Central Park’s pathways, stretching a combined length of 23 miles. Although the public had mixed feelings about the installation, the gates undeniably brought color to New York’s austere winter landscape.

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