layouts – lesley's headspace

Drawing archive

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Over the past week I’ve been working on my layered illustrations for my book since I’ve already settled the type styles and the technical aspects of putting it together. By focusing on the illustrations now, I’ll have enough raw material to start putting drafts for the mural together and I’ll be able to consider my gallery setup with more concrete details. I’ll probably pick up on more typesetting this week and start laying out more of the content to determine if I need to generate more.

One additional concept I’ve added on is the introduction of the tarot/fortune cards to the story – I’ll be redesigning the card frames and writing in meanings for the spreads that are interspersed with the story to help create additional layers of storytelling and meaning:

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A lot of this is getting very introspective (I’ve been playing Sunless Sea, a very deep storytelling game that has probably influenced the amount of content I’m building around my narratives) but I hope to be able to map it out soon in a more critical way that deconstructs the narrative process (just to please people who couldn’t understand my research… *cough* and I do like mapping now).

The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is one of those unexplained documents that remains undeciphered. Its pages are festooned with unreadable script and improbable oddities and diagrams, esoteric images that capture the imagination and serve as an undeniably good reference for my project.

I love how there’s so much mystery surrounding this weird old book – no-one can exactly place who wrote it, whether or not it was fraudulent and why it was created. The air of mystery surrounding something so obtuse is another aspect of it that fascinates me, that I could possibly bring to my own work to add a layer of richness. (I’m still very fascinated by Da Vinci’s mirror writing.)

The plant drawings in particular appear to be composites corresponding to other pharmacological drawings, which probably means that I should be doing more compositing myself. I’m thinking of branching out into even stranger anatomical forms, mixing human anatomy with animal anatomy and adding on traditional aspects of diseased flesh (i.e. pustules, scaling, etc.) to push the limits of the grotesque in my work.

Something I’m taking note of is that some of the pages in the Voynich manuscript fold out to reveal larger diagrams – I’m seriously considering adapting this for my project as well in terms of the form of my compendium.

The puzzle storybook I made

(I’m honestly quite terrified that my gift recipient will think to ask me how my FYP progress is going and I’ll have to make up some excuse about not giving out my URL until after mid-September is over, but I need to log my progress and I need to balance that with the pressing need to keep this surprise a surprise.)

I based the design of my book on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, except I set my type in Baskerville because it just goes well with abandoned houses and Sherlockian mysteries. The inner margins are large because I’m using Japanese stab binding.

This is the TextEdit document where I wrote out the entire puzzle in chronological order and scrambled the numbers once I had it scripted out. It isn’t the best way to do this, especially not when you get beyond 50 paragraphs, and the prospect of creating a similar puzzle at a larger scale terrifies me beyond words.