Tag: black and white

2D – And another bites the dust.

My last quote to explore,

So, my little Amélie, you don’t have bones of glass. You can take life’s knocks.

This was when Mr Dufayel told Amelie that she would need to get out of her comfort zone to pursue the man she loves. She cannot wait anymore and she can take it because she isn’t made of glass like Mr Dufayel.

Draft 1. The most literal and banal. Literally you are made of bones, the world will knock you but you won’t break. Obviously it looked too simple.

Draft 2, I then explored the idea of knocking on a skull and what better way to illustrate this than a door knocker. It seemed a little too plain, so I added “people” to knock the door after.

Draft 3, I really liked that this work wasn’t as symmetrical as my previous few works and there was interaction and movement to it. I do feel however, it does not encapsulate the quote anymore.

Out of whim, I created a draft 4, which was a wine glass that was made of bones. It looked more like a chalice, but you get the drift. I did this because I thought wine glasses were fragile and that it being made of bones would augment the idea. However, I did not take into account that I need to show life knocking.

It brings me to draft 5. However, this then makes me feel like “Amelie” personified by the bone wine glass is hurting the glass objects when knocked onto it. It then reverses the idea to Amelie being to strong and hurting Dufayel, which is… incorrect.

Draft 6, I then recalled an idea of repetition to show strength and emphasis. I decided to repeat the broken wine glasses around the bone-glass. In the it shows that no matter what, the glass shatters but the bones remain intact. I guess I made my point here.

After consulting Mimi, she said that my chalice looks too photoshopped and I should make it more crafted instead of a human body. I should also make the glasses smaller to make the chalice stand out.

Using segments of a human skeletal system, I re-crafted the chalice to look more like a glass than a skeletal system. I also used the idea of emphasis to augment the intention of strength. Overall I am quite happy how this turned out. It’s not my usual route to do something like this. I would either go full illustrative or full pattern, but this is a simple idea which resulted from me editing concept execution to be concise.

Post-assignment. I really learnt how to be concise with myself. I need to keep doing that so that I can be a stronger designer, balancing ostentatiousness with good design. I think the pit fall of many people is that they want their works to look pretty and grandeur, but their concept breaks apart and their work needs to be heavily explained. The design no longer speaks for itself.

Overall, I want to reach the level in which people get my work without the need of explanation. They get my intentions and they get my designs.

2D – One more to the list.

One more to the lit of quotes to ideate.

Everybody wants to be us.

Well no surprise, this was from Devil Wears Prada when Andrea told Miranda about some guys ploy to replace her and Miranda shocks Andrea that Miranda had already calculated and sacrificed her pawns wisely. In which Andrea responds that she didn’t want to become like Miranda, but Miranda said the line and Andrea walks off in self-realisation.

Draft 1, where I put a Marilyn Monroe onto a screen with paparazzi shooting her. As usual, from the beginning, the idea is way too simple. Although I want to depict the idea of beauty and fashion and desire.

The next Draft, I used the leading fashion lady herself, Anna Wintour and how in evolution, even monkeys wanted to be her, I think this was very clear but at the same time this was very simple and needed more layering. It didn’t look aesthetically pleasing as well.

The next draft was inspired by runway and how we are chasing for the latest fashion trend or the latest runway collateral. This was a bit confusing because the paparazzi silhouette didn’t show well. The Elizabethan girl was very well juxtaposed and the hands looked a bit too awkward. I did like the flag effect that followed through with the idea though.

I then had a sudden stroke of genius one night. I recalled a friend talking to me about her FYP many years back about how we are sheep to the media, blindly following trends, how we wanted to be like what the media portrayed.

My next draft would be this. A pin-up pose model enclosed in a TV set with a herd of sheep following her. I made her a wolf because the media preys on our attention. To supplement the idea of attention, I used the paparazzi photo to enhance the idea. I think this encapsulates the idea of the quote. Although I wish it could be augmented to be large in length, it does look very pleasing and I do like the juxtaposition between the engraving texture and the threshold effect.

Following this, I consulted Mimi and she told me to lighten the background and to edited the sheep so it does not look so patchy.

I inverted the silhouette to that the engraved mesh parts would more of a grey tone. However, I do think that it looked better darker. It looks like a TV static which is to what I like. It really does speak the quote, but I think that the background should’ve remained the previous one.

 

2D – Another quote.

The next quote I explored was

Listen, balance, my darling, is not letting anybody love you less than you love yourself.

it was a line from Eat, Pray, Love  by Felipe to Liz when Felipe asked Liz if she loved him and they got into an argument where Felipe screamed this at her and she screamed back that he didn’t know anything. He exposes her inner insecurities about herself and what she wanted to find in her journey and causes her to lose her so called sense-of-balance.

Draft 1, I used the skull to signify life, the heart to signify love, and the scales for balance. I went super literal on this and I felt like it was so plain. SCRAP!

Next, draft 2, I used the girl on a tight rope to show her own inner turmoil of balance. I put her in a plague doctor mask and put her on top of a roaring crowd of fans filtered in a moire pattern. I liked the story aspect of this, because the idea of the girl crossing the tight rope to find her balance, yet there is a distracting crowd pressurising her despite her anonymous look except with a plague doctor mask.

I did feel that this was not a good composition but a good concept to carry on, having a story to go with.

 

Draft 3, it was using the concept of listening to your inner self. The idea is having the silhouette of the maiden balancing and listening to the encased heart in lock and chain to find her inner voice. I’m not sure for this work. There is something off about it, maybe the use of the see- saw. But I liked the idea of listening, so I might continue the idea of encasing the heart and listening.

Draft 4, I carried on the listening concept and used the symbol of balance, yin and yang to encase the figure listening to her heart in a yin-yang symbol.

There’s something off about this image, but I wanted to explore the yin-yang symbol and push the idea even further.

Draft 5, I created the idea of listening to forest of your heart in your head. I really liked this idea, but I felt like it is still literal. I’m getting closer? But I do like the aesthetics of this.

After consultation, my tutor told me that a lot of my ideas began to be too connoted and there was too much to decipher from the image. I decided to scale back.

She told me to take draft 3 and expand the idea to that of a confessional.

I adapted the idea of eaves dropping into this image to include a confessional. The idea was to adapt the concept of eavesdropping into yourself. But I feel like I needed someone to tell to have someone to hear.

I removed the locks because it was too much and left the heart inside the confessional. I also added someone to “tell”. I chose an old woman instead of a younger similar woman. I guess it could show that the old woman is telling younger self to listen to her heart… which brings me to an even more interesting edit to the balance scale.

I added the clock face to the scale. I guess it would make it look like the confessional is a time portal. While I think it might convolute the quote and pack too much ideas into one image, I do think that there is a small value to it than having a simple balance scale.

After consulting Mimi, she told me to use an actual confessional and to blow up the size and to have someone listening to the heart. I came up with this at first and felt like I need to embellish the idea with more and more things.

I ended up increasing the saturation of the mesh to make the person look more ambiguous but seen. while balancing the heart on a see-saw and to encase the person in an actual box, setting a scenery behind their conversation.

I used a mesh technique to create a forest foliage look, I do have to commend myself on that creativity. Haha.

Overall, I do not like this one as much as the ones I have done, because I felt like I should have edited myself more concisely and to not put too many elements.

While I do like the idea of having the background. I could have done away with the see-saw or vice-versa. I could have made the silhouette more obvious by darkening the figure and then using the moire technique for the confessional instead of the other way round.

2D – Quotes to Ideas

So I have finally chosen 4 quotes to fill up my project. I will slowly ideate them here (because I need to write to fill my brain).

Pretty on the outside… but like a fruit that bugs have eaten from within

This quote came from the Japanese movie Helter Skelter. The premise of the sentence and the movie was the main character, Liliko, describing her rotten nature and personality despite her outer appearance as an idol. Liliko is a supermodel in Japan who had attained full body plastic surgery from a hospital with illegal practices and to sustain the beauty, she requires the expensive treatment. Due to the decline in her popularity, her manager is no longer inclined to invest in Liliko. As a result, her health and beauty starts to decline, she begins to age, look uglier, have spots on her body.

Some key ideas that I would want to demonstrate from this quote is the idea of beauty and fruit.

Fruits that have been linked to beauty would be the apple due to the links it had with knowledge and humility. Eg. Garden of Eden, Apple with Eve in the bible and Lilith before her despair in Faust.

Flies and maggots are a symbol of a symbiotic relationship of the world, where the flies are parasitic to left over and maggots are left to hatch in the crevices of the rotten fruits. The pagan God or Abrahamic Demon Beelzebub, has also been described as a giant fly.

Draft 1, I decided to go literal.

I used a female statue and the apple to describe heart and lungs (the core of a person) as well as a fly to ‘eat’ it. The background is negligible.

I don’t really like it because the apple looks too small and the rotten apple feeling isn’t pushed through.

Draft 2, I decided to go a little macabre, using virgin Mary as a symbol of beauty but the dead body and the rotten apple to signify rotting. It’s still too literal! But it is visually pleasing.

Draft 3, The lungs, apple, fly. I wanted to show the inner beauty thing with the rotten heart (rotten apple) being eaten by the fly. But it’s not pushing through aesthetically.

Draft 4, The tabernacle of rotten fruit. I decided to use an object that was sacred and connoted as beautiful, the tabernacle and replace the eucharist with a rotting apple with a lot of flies and being laid on a maggot background. I quite like this because it looks very eerie and stark. It helps to supplement my idea of beauty on the outside but rotten on the inside.

 

Draft 5, I decided to redo draft 2 to include a mirror frame. It would look like a reflection of self and had a more refine quality to it as compared to the original.

Consequently, I realised that it was a good idea to continue with this and to clean it up so it looks like a good print for silkscreen.

Overall, I do enjoy this work as it encapsulates the quote of self-reflection and decay. I think it has spoken for itself and I’m glad I chose this permutation.

My Line is Emo

Concluding the project, I was really glad that most of my classmates appreciated my work and understood my concept. I was glad that many people understood my layering process and ideology and was intrigued by my methods.

Recapping from my instructor’s feedback in which she liked the exploration of the black background and appreciated my exploration of various line work, however I needed to explore different papers. I understood her point of view but I do stand firm that I liked the consistency of the papers.

Moving forward, I think for future work, I could continue using layering and texturing for my image making and to consult my tutor if I do have ideas before it’s too late. I could also come out with more drafts and not be too emotionally entangled with the drafts so that I can let them go and redo a cleaner and more refined version of the work.