Reflective Report - Editorial Brief

Final Piece

I chose the article titled "The age of loneliness is killing us" by George Monbiot, it was interesting but somewhat pessimistic, however there was lots of imagery potential with this piece. I started with a page of super rough roughs, but realised that a few of these were too specific to certain bits of the text - eg "Britain is the loneliest country in Europe". I used most of these initial 12 ideas to develop into more detailed concepts - but found most of them too scrappy and not very editorial looking?

 

STRENGTHS  

• generating the initial ideas
• working within the square restraint
• working with two colours

DIFFICULTIES 

• representing the article clearly enough
• aesthetics over clearly showing the message??
• time management 
• messiness

I looked at some of Daeyhun Kim's work and decided to try some black and white style roughs - really liked these. My favourite image was the bottom left with the two hands, I liked the concept but was worried it didn't represent loneliness enough. I struggled a lot at this point as I begun to develop some of my ideas which showed the article better but I wasn't as enthused about. I kept coming back to the idea of the hands. Peer crits were very beneficial - people seemed to like the hands idea but some were unsure of what it was representing. After talking to Jamie he encouraged me to continue with this idea but change some elements so that I could make the message of the article come across more clearly. 

Increasing number of people helped - thought it would show the idea of loneliness better and make it look less like an illustration about romance / two people 

I wasted a lot of time umming and ahing about which design to pursue which pushed me time-wise, but once I was certain and happy things got easier. As I was going to be doing my final outcome by hand using acrylic paint I came across hurdles such as making the hands match, and the textured surface of the grainy stock I was using meant that it took much longer than expected to fill in the black.

Cut out a stencil which helped me to make the hands look even

I decided to change the body positions of the people as a way of showing loneliness more easily, once I got over this hurdle things went more smoothly - although drawing a person in the foetal position to represent being lonely is a pretty big cliche. I really like the process of completing things by hand, but once I have learnt more in Photoshop I think it will make pieces like this easier, quicker and seem more crisp and professional. Usually with a lot of projects I will quickly doodle roughs before impatiently diving into the final thing, but the structure of these 2 weeks in having well planned out roughs really helped me to get the most out of my designs and through trial and error create a final outcome I was pleased with.