Do Judge a Book By its Cover: Development

Initially I decided to develop the rough depicting out body experiences as it had been a particular favourite of mine. Furthermore I was interested in trying to develop a character and experimenting with the different ways it could be created and what effect this was add to the final image.

Therefore after drawing him in various different positions I decided to produce him in a range of different media including ink, acrylic, charcoal and paper cut. In particular I thought both the paper cut version and charcoal one reinforced the idea that it was someone's spirit/conscience floating out of there body.This was achieved in the paper cut version by the lack of outline and choice of soft colours whereas with the charcoal it was the fragile/delicate feel that made it seem less solid.

However, taking the advice given in the group crit, I decided that the final image needed to be something more sinister and disconcerting. The character above felt to charming/innocent to effectively communicate the main essence of the book.

Therefore I tried experimenting with really basic/wobbly ink washed figures depicting this same idea. I particularly liked the fluidity of the forms that give it a sense of movement as well as the immediacy that was achieved through the simplicity of the forms.

 Liking the effect I had achieved I decided to quickly try it out for two other concepts which included that of dopplegangers and the unfamiliar nuclear family to see whether it would be as successful.

After producing these I realised that my peers in the group crit were right in that the nuclear family idea was the most effective. This is due to the fact that it really does give a sense of some thing familiar yet disturbingly unrecognisable. However I wasn't sure if this approach was right as, taking my research into account, I feel the  book covers with the most impact are more often than not those with I more graphic edge to them. Therefore I chose to pursue my original design.

I decided to try using paper cut to create it so as to give it a hand made bespoke feel to it as well as avoid the sterilisation of the imagery which I thought had occurred during my last project through the use of digital media. 

However, when using this method to produce my final image I kept encountering various problems which effected the quality of the outcome. Letters were particularly hard to cut precisely at the desired size and greatly detracted from the quality of outcome achieved through this method. Furthermore it was difficult to get it to successfully fold without further damaging the piece.

All these points, as well as how time consuming it is made me reconsider the use of paper cut over digital.