Design

The images below are photos of my final piece for my self directed brief, when we were set to plan our brief i knew i wanted to do a small illustrative book because i have always enjoyed reading them, however i wanted to do somethin a bit darker, so i decided to involve some of my own dark ironic humour into the book and pick a theme i would enjoy working on. The conclusion of the theme was death, not death in the sense of mourning a loss or any unethical reading involved, but deaths that are just unlucky to the person involved. I started reading into them and found alot of them were very funny and gave alot to the imagination so i decided to sketch some out and my project started to grow. At the start of the self directed brief i found it difficult to get going as this was our own project so the lecturers couldn't fully advise us where to go next untill they understood where we were going with it. As i started to produce images and mock ups i could easily gain feedback from tutors and my piers so it was useful to develop early, this ended up changing the look of my book from what i originally wanted it to look like.

I was all emphasis on the visual of my book, however i didn't just want to draw them so i decided to play around with print and working with texture and it proved extremely helpful. I gained alot of influence from Edward Gorey and his alphabet death book, he drew really detailed backgrounds yet still managed to have all the focus on the small image in a certain corner of the page. I decided to experiment with background work and eventually came to the conclusion of lino print, i used a soft lino on a print pad which gave me an excellent texture after i cut the background from it. For the little images themselves i decided not to leave my own style because thats what i am good at and i don't really want to change it as in my sketchbook when experiment it didn't feel like my drawings.

So.. at the end of the project i completed 10 images from each decade of the 20th Century, Lino printing the background and water coloured the pen marked pictures in the corner of the images. Here are some examples of the final images.