For this exercise I hunted through numerous photographs that showed a foreground and background and settled on this one that I took of my son when walking in the Lake District.
My understanding of this exercise was to try and create a number of different images or narratives from 1 image. Taking 2 ‘L’ shaped pieces of paper I began to experiment with cropping the image to generate a different feeling or mood.
The interesting thing with the next 2 crops generated a different narrative down to the positioning of my son.
‘Distance’ suggests the boy is looking into the depths of the woods searching for something. The next image gives the opposite impression. In ‘Watching’ whilst the boy is looking into the woods, the narrative of the image suggests someone or something is watching from the rear.
Tall images lead the eye from the bottom to top of the image and and long/thin images lead the eye across the image. I also experimented with rotating the crop so the angle of the trees generated a slightly different composition and feel to the image.
One last experiment was to try a triangle crop to see if it could add anything interesting to the image.
At first my favourite image was ‘Forgotten’ as it seamed to create a narrative that could suggest a creepy storyline from a film.
After spending some more time looking through the images and discussing with others about the type of story the image could suggest; I started to prefer the image ‘fall’. However, something felt ‘off’ with the image and I found a better composition if the image was flipped on it’s vertical axis. It still generated a creepy narrative but I liked how the horizon was tilted to give a sqewed look on reality.
Next I wasn’t sure where to go with the style of how I wanted to attempt this illustration so I started with something I haven’t tried previously; using a craft knife to cut the image up. I created both a positive and negative space versions to begin with.
Taking this a stage further I worked into them in Photoshop trying different Hue’s, saturation’s, blending modes and layering these together.
These developments reminded me of 1970/80’s style horror movies with the use of vibrant reds against dark or muted tones and blurred imagery.
The illustrations I had developed still seemed to be missing something so I tried another approach by drawing out part of the image, outlining with ink and scanning in to work into digitally.
Part of my feedback from the previous unit was to try and make my illustrations less clean and polished with more expressive, dynamic and loose marks. I began by building up layers in Photoshop starting with flat colours, adding darker tones and then lighter tones. Each time trying to use a more expressive mark, almost like when using paint.
Finally I added expressive lines into the background and blurred the layers to give the impression of distance. This was also a technique learned from a previous exercise to create depth with blur. I also decided to rotate my final image giving the impression that the fallen trees in the background are actually the ones still standing and the foreground looks like the reality that is ‘falling’. I believe this final illustration works well in developing several narratives on what it could be about and realises my idea of creating a horror poster from a single innocent image but cropped in an interesting way.
Illustration 1 