Chris Haughton & People Tree

IGI member Chris Haughton, recently listed by TIME magazine as part of their DESIGN 100, talks to SCAMP about his illustration & design work for the Fair trade company People Tree in Japan.

People Tree produce gifts and clothing through groups and projects set up to employ minorities or disabled individuals in the developing world who are without access to social welfare. Some of the projects set up help women who may have been divorced through domestic abuse or disabled individuals who would not be able to earn money outside of their family. We have made different products together from t-shirts and dresses to bags and stationery.

For the past four years I have produced stationery for People Tree’s new year gifts in Japan. Diaries, cards and other gift items using the traditional Japanese/Chinese new year animal are traditionally sent each new year in Japan and People Tree makes its own hand made cards and diaries from unbleached jute paper and natural traditional dyes. They produce these through their co-operatives in Bangladesh and sometimes in Nepal.

I was asked in June 07 to produce two ‘Happy New Year’ paper cards and a cotton diary cover for the ‘Year of the Cow’ in 2009 (2009 is the Japanese year of the cow). People Tree works with very long lead times as all their products are made from scratch by their artisans. It takes months to produce the hand-made paper (it is made from fibre wastes from either pineapple / jute or pond water hyacinth…) and screen print the images individually in Bangladesh. The producers often work from home so they can still care for their family or work on the farm whilst earning the extra income, and this can mean the products are all made in very basic conditions by hand and often with no electricity at all. They are made in rural areas in Bangladesh so that People Tree can support the poorer local communities and minorities outside of the economic hub of Dhaka. They are shipped back to Japan from where they can distribute and stock them throughout the country in time for late 2008. This means that I am always working years ahead in the future. A few months ago i had to ask the guy in the bank what year it was…!

STEP BY STEP…..

I started off by doing some doodles of cows on paper. I had thought of doing a farmer too but left him out. I generally don’t do this from any photo references. I can usually draw a better cow character from memory than when I use photos as reference… but then again if i realise I’ve forgotten what a cow looks like I’ll google it…

next I draw the text.

As the cow becomes more ‘cow-like’ I can start moving on to stage two, ‘scanning in’. Now I can tweak and colour it in Photoshop. This is the fun part. I can swap the heads / eyes of the different cow doodles, give them different
poses. The images need to be converted to flat graphic screen prints, it needs to be bold and simple and either black or white or it wont print well. Once I have a cow that I like the look of I can start looking at the colours.
The screen printing process means that the final image can only be made up of one or two colours.

I decide on one diary cover (front and back) and two cards.

From start to finish I think this took about 2-3 days or so to complete…(always longer than i think it will…) and that was spread over about 3 weeks because I was juggling other jobs at the time.

I split these into the screens that are needed to align and overprint on top of each other. These are then emailed to Japan, then they are printed out and posted to Bangladesh. Sometimes they get me to change it a bit, but I escaped without any alterations this time.

Here’s one we prepared earlier! 2008 will be the year of the mouse in Japan. Here you can see them being individually printed in the workshop at Eastern Screen Printers in Saidpur, in northern Bangladesh. The diaries will then be sent on to Bonoful co-operative in Bangladesh to be bound.

The final products from last year. The cards and a little gift box to hold them.

For more information about People Tree visit their UK website
www.peopletree.co.uk

You can see more of Chris’s inspiring work at vegetablefriedrice.com

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under Illustration, Step-by-steps, Typography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.