Mock Election Poster

Rogue Magazine came up with a topic for their December issue called 'Redesigning Manila' wherein they approached several of Manila's creatives to work on their own versions of various elements in the social landscape.

As a part of this, I was asked to come up with my own take in election posters. I can choose whoever I want, as long as they're actually running. This last bit actually made it hard. With the current crop of senatoriables that are gunning for it this coming May, I'm not really leaning onto any of them. Call me pessimist but there's always something you'll discover in these candidates that you won't like. I actually spent a lot of time looking over the all of their backgrounds before starting on anything.

In times like these, we go for the lesser evil. I chose Trillianes because he always came off as this highly-idealistic soldier caught up the deeply convoluted environment of Philippine politics. Choosing him also gives me strong visual elements, because I can use the Magdalo insignia & take a military motif. Also, around the time that I was working on this, he was caught up in a word war with Sen. Enrile, an expert in traditional politics, and that had a really nice old school vs new school backdrop to it.

At first I thought making an icon of Trillianes would be nice. I remember the really nice sticker of Joker Arroyo that went around when he was campaigning years ago.

But it didn't kinda fit the feel that I was going for, which came about when I thought of built the Philippine flag around the Magdalo insignia.

I wanted a really heavy Soviet propaganda feel, but still maintain the Filipino angle.

I also didn't want to leave it too clean, so I went over the layout and added fill-ins by hand in order to get a rough, handmade feel.

I totally did away with the Trillianes head icon and resorted to a rough scratchboard caricature sketch. I like the idea of negation for the image since he's the guy who negated all the rules & the concept of due process by walking out of the courtroom, marching towards a hotel in Makati, setting up a base of operations there and calling on then president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to step down. That's what this guy can do in a day. All in a freaking day.