Summative Post 4

As I’ve frequently highlighted in this blog, I have felt time and again this year that, despite the successes I’ve made with my practice this year, more could be done to develop my visual communication.

Therefore I wanted my final major brief to have a lot of conceptual depth and allow communicate themes, ideas and concepts in a concise and effective manner.

Dune

My proposed Dune project naturally seems like the perfect opportunity for me to achieve this things as well further steer my practice into the area of the creative industry I’m interested in; this time in regards to adult publishing and editorial.

Although in my statement of intent I’ve highlighted that I want this to loosely be a Folio Society style brief, this is more in regards to the context of creating a cover image and 4 inner images from than creating a series of full bleed images cinematic images. This is because I want to use this project as an opportunity explore and communicate the key themes of Dune rather simply illustrate what happens within it.

Conceptual Development

Despite this I still wanted there to be a sense of narrative within my work and found the work of contemporary illustrators Blex Bolex and Icnonri highly informative. This is because both of their practices have a very strong sense of narrative that is achieved through more abstract compositional methods that aren’t often associated with narrative image making. In my opinion this results in a much more immersive series of images that are actually much stronger in evoking a sense of narrative. This is something which I have tried to achieve with my Dune brief.

Alex Bolex

Iconori

Conceptually I was mainly interested in exploring the two rival families within Dune; the protagonist Attreides family as well as the antagonistic Harkonens. This is because I feel both families have very strong recurring themes and motifs attached to them through out the book which would allow me to create the more abstract narrative image which I desired.

In the case of the Attreides family, this project has been about trying to visually show Paul’s prescience, particularly its ominous and often violent predictions that he is constantly trying to avoid but feels powerless to stop. In contrast to this the Harkonens are all about blind conquest and stopping at nothing to eliminate their adversaries. Therefore I felt these two conflicting concepts would help create a dynamic, tense yet unified set of final images.

Aesthetically I wanted to try and avoid sci-fi clichés and therefore was drawn to the work of Daniel Mroz. Although operating in the realm of science fiction, much of his work was produced  between 1950 and 1970 before a lot of the genre current tropes had established themselves. In particular I like how the work is highly influenced by highly traditional illustration often associated with earlier time periods such as the 1800s.

Daniel Mroz

Final Images/ Publication

I think that the final images that I produced effectively incorporate the developments I have made through this year and are an example of the visual language I am currently implementing. Furthermore I feel that they have effectively achieved the conceptually and communicative depth that I feel my earlier briefs were lacking.

I think I have also very carefully considered context here given that I decided some of my images would form a fold out publication where as others would form editioned art prints.

This was so as to best capitalise on what I had learnt through my editions brief as well as finally, and I think quite effectively, combine the skills I have leant through my freelance commercial design work with my illustration practice.

In hindsight my only issue with this is that I didn’t give enough time or consideration to production methods. Although I have printed out a mock up, I should have realised that to effectively fold up the final product would have had to be on much thinner stock and therefore would need a print process, such as offset lithography or risograph, that would better sit on the paper.