THE DAILY MAMMOTH - Prehistoric Newspaper + Process Video
Prehistoric people were the true hippies. They didn't cut their hair, lived a nomadic lifestyle, and, I imagine, probably embraced the idea of free love (you gotta populate the earth!)
And as nomads, what better way to keep in touch with the events of the-lands-over-there than with a newspaper?
Our first Contextual weekly assignment was about alphabets, and we were asked to create our own interpretation of it. We were allowed to draw inspiration from prehistoric alphabets, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese alphabets.
The idea of making a prehistoric newspaper came to me when I was thinking about how people communicated back in the day. Smoke signals? Do they leave signs in nature like gypsies? Did they have any way to spread information to multiple people at once? The newspaper came to be because the printer was invented, but is the newspaper dependent on the printer, or did it merely spark the possibility of mass communication?
And so The Daily Mammoth was born.
Prehistoric humans wrote language through pictures, or pictographs. Thus, even though I'm making a newspaper, I'm not making one in a traditional sense. First of all, there are no words, only pictographs, and second, it can't be printed on paper, because the paper wasn't invented until c. 105 BC.
So what I did, I burned the edges of two pieces of plywood to give it a "chunky" edge. Then, I applied 4-5 layers of house paint to give it texture. Acrylic is then applied with a sponge, to create shade that is reminiscent of stone walls. The pictographs are drawn on with charcoal, which is then dabbed with water to set it better (prehistoric people drew their works using dried animal blood and mashed ground).
This is the first page. The Daily Mammoth is written on top. The pictographs show a sun rising and setting over the horizon twice, which means "daily". Next to it is a crude drawing of a mammoth. In fact, the style has to be crude, because back then people could only create two-dimensional paintings.
Below it, the main headline---a successful hunt!
Of course, creating a prehistoric newspaper also made me think about what events were important for them back then. They may not worry about nuclear war, but would be devastated if someone stole one or two spearheads. They may not care about increasing world hunger and poverty, but would probably report migrating seasons for bisons and birds and anything they hunt for food.
The pictograph above tell the story of a hunt, and the spoils they got from it---antlers, hides, and meat. The lower right corner, though, shows a man encased in a rectangle, meaning they lost one man in the hunt.
The second one tells two stories. Dominating the "spread" are three hands of various sizes. This tells the story of a newcomer, a new baby in the family. I think this would be really important news back then, because infant mortality was high, and people basically existed to survive and pass their genes onto their offsprings.
The second one, on the upper left side of the "spread", tells a tale of impending doom. A shaman, characterised by his larger size than the rest of the people, has a vision---darkness in the sky, skeletal trees, a black sun setting (which symbolises shorter, darker days), and ice on the ground. He is having a vision of the Ice Age. I think these sort of easter eggs are what really contributes to the newspaper's comedic value, though it's sort of dark if you think about the Ice Age vision.
A few more close-ups of the work (click on image to enlarge):
A few pre-sketches:
And finally, a video of the process:
As the first weekly assignment, it definitely started with a bang. I love the final result because it's out of the box, it has that sense of humour that defines my style, and because it's nice to look at.
Sometimes you like things just because they're damn nice to look at.