My Recent PSD Designs

I am sure you will like this. They are experimental photoshop designs meant for your pleasure and leisure

My Newly Found Habit is Designing

I have found a new habit, wondering what it is? it is the habit of designing using Corel draw, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Below are few of my designs. please feel free to criticise or commend them, just ensure that you are as objective as possible knowing that others that visit this blog are going to see your comments.

The truth is that i saw this designs some where on a home page as fliers and I decided to try them out myself on photoshop, I also improved on them.

Believe me, I designed every bit of these. Are they not nice?, sure, they are.

Festival In my Area- Eyo festival

black and white print

Eyo Festival is a festival unique to my state of origin Lagos, Nigeria. It is usually performed in Lagos Island. Eyo also refers to the masquerades that come out during the festival. It is widely believed that Eyo is the forerunner of the mod¬ern day carnival in Brazil. On Eyo Day, the main highway in the heart of the city (from the end of Carter Bridge to Tinubu Square) is closed to traffic, allowing for procession from Idumota to Iga Idunganran.

Here, the participants all pay homage to the Oba (King) of Lagos. Eyo festival takes place whenever occasion and tradition demand, but it is usually held as the final burial rites for a highly regarded chief.

Among the Yorubas, the indigenous religions have largely given way to Christianity and Islam, but the old festivals are still observed. The traditional leaders of the Yorubas are the Obas, who live in palaces and govern along with a council of ministers. The Obas' position is now mainly honorary, and their chiefly role is during the observance of the festivals.

Order of events during Eyo Festival

A full week before the festival (always a Sunday), the ‘senior’ eyo group, the Adimu (identified by a black broad-rimmed hat), goes public with a staff, when this happens it means the event would take place on the following Saturday. Each of the four other ‘important’ ones—Laba (Red), Oniko (yellow), Ologede (Green), Agere (Purple)—in this very order take their turns from Monday to Thursday.

 The Significance of Festivals in Yoruba Land

Yoruban festivals honor their pantheon of gods and mark the installation of a new Oba. For example, we have the Engungun ("en-GOON-gun") festival, which honors the ancestors, lasts 24 days. Each day, a different Engungun in the person of a masked dancer dances through the town, possessed by one of the ancestors. On the last day, a priest goes to the shrine of the ancestors and sacrifices animals, pouring the blood on the shrine. The sacrifices are collected, and they become the food for the feast that follows.
Bessam louis

THE CONTEXT, CONTENT AND CULTURE OF DANCE IN AFRICA. (ABSTRACT)

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Dance is defined as patterned and rhythmic bodily movements, usually performed to music. This definition is vividly depicted in my work.

In Africa, dance serve as a form of communication or expression. Africans express themselves naturally through movement. Dance in African context is the transformation of ordinary functional and expressive movement into extraordinary movements for extraordinary purposes; every movement such as walking, talking, jumping is performed in our dance in a patterned way, perhaps in circles or to a special rhythm, and it occurs in a special context. The movements of divers lines in my work are used to depict this.

In dance, every culture in Africa has a fixed vocabulary of movements that has meaning and interpretation in their culture. Every culture emphasizes certain features in its dance styles. African dance has symbolic gestures. Peoples of different cultures dance differently and for varying purposes as their form of communication or expression. The wavy lines below the drum are used to depict this.

FUNCTIONS OF DANCE IN AFRICA AS DEPICTED IN THE WORK

In the culture of Africa dance serve many functions. It may be a form of worship, a means of honoring ancestors, a way of propitiating the gods, or a method to effect magic. African dance is usually done as an art, ritual, or as form of recreation as done regularly by children. It goes beyond the functional purposes of the movements used in work or athletics in order to express emotions, moods, or ideas;

African dance usually tell a story; serve religious, political, economic, or social needs; or simply be an experience that is pleasurable, exciting, or aesthetically valuable. In some African societies, dancing often leads to trance or other altered states of consciousness. These states can be interpreted as signaling possession by spirits, or they may be sought as a means to emotional release.

As depicted in the work we see the body of the dancer performing such actions as rotating, bending, stretching, jumping, and turning. By varying these physical actions and using different dynamics, the dancers communicate and convey certain thoughts.

The predominant elements of African dance are depicted. This includes the use of space—floor patterns, the shapes of the moving body, and designs in space made by the parts of the body; (2) the use of time—tempo, the length of a dance, rhythmic variations, and the attitude toward filling time, from taking one's time to making quick stops and starts; lines with African motifs is used to represent this. (3) the use of the body's weight—overcoming gravity to execute light, graceful movements, surrendering to gravity with heavy or limp movements, and (4) the use of energy flow—tense, restrained, or bound movements or freely flowing motion. Feelings and ideas can be expressed and communicated

                                                                                                                                     Bessam louis