Stage Coach Players, a local theatre group in DeKalb, was putting on a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and made a competition for our class to make play posters for them to be displayed at the theatre. 

When reading the script, I narrowed in on this idea of how old psychiatry used to be incredibly disturbing, quite frankly grossly negligent, and invasive in practice. A fun fact about cuckoo birds is that they don’t nest–they’re brood parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds nests, and then when they hatch often steal resources and foods from the other chicks leading to their death. While thinking about that fact about the bird, and other animals referenced in the script including bunnies, I combined the animals with this idea of invasive psychiatric practice to create the poster.

Originally, I tried to morph the image of a bird and bunny together like that rabbit-duck illusion, but the way it was turning out in sketches made the image too forced. It was not working naturally or well enough to be successful as a double image. So, instead I focused on the idea of creating my own Rorschach blots to form the shape of birds.

To make the ink blots, I sketched out a rough image and filled that outline with water and then dropped ink into the water to let it spread out naturally. I then squished the paper together to get the mirror images. These were then minimally altered in Photoshop where I mostly just cleaned up runny areas to make the bird shape more pronounced, and they were flipped and repeated in the final poster.

This piece was a part of a class competition where the actors of the play voted for their favorite poster. This poster won the most cast votes, and the lead actor of the play asked for a copy which I signed for him.