Assignment Five - Personalise Your Notebook

1st Draft

Concept:

Exterior

The covers portray the dark side of reality, and how childhood fantasies about adult life often turn out false. The colourful balloons the little boy is holding, symbolise the many happy dreams a child normally has, and hopes he holds for the future. However, the balloons are all floating towards a mess of dark clouds. This is to convey the sense of ominous and impending doom for the balloons.

Interior

A sole flower shaped like a heart, is amongst the bushes. It is bending over, as if dead. This is supposed to complement the text 'love is dead'. However, I realised that the text does not reflect the message I'm trying to convey at all.

Techniques:

Balloons

• The balloons are brightly coloured to portray the cheeriness and brimming hope the child holds.
• The balloons nearer the clouds are drawn smaller than the rest, as to communicate depth in the image, and that the balloons are floating away from the viewer, and in a sense, 'into' the laptop.

Child

• The child is drawn to sit on the logo of the laptop, as I deduce that many other artworks would most likely ignore the logo, and therefore I have decide to incorporate it into my work.

Overall

• A gradient of grey and white is used, in a diagonal way. This allows the portion where the child is at, to be brighter, to convey the sense of positivity. Conversely, the dark clouds are enveloped by the darker grey, and this carries the meaning of negativity.
  

2nd Draft

Reasons for changes:

Addition of lightning flashes:

• makes it clearer to viewer that those are lightning clouds
• reinforces the threatening ambience intended in the work.

Change in text from 'love is dead' to 'reality is harsh':

• I realised that the latter makes more sense as it relates to the entire message I am trying to convey.

Heart-shaped flower replaced with broken balloon:

• From the comments I received, I realise that some find it ambiguous what happens to the balloons after they float towards the dark clouds. Hence, the broken balloon amongst the bushes will show that the balloons burst and drop back to the land, when they hit the clouds.
  

Reflections:

I have never thought of how important colours are, in our judgement of objects, until this assignment. After listening to the lecture on colours and doing the assignment, the significance of colours proved to be overwhelming, and in fact, most important amongst all other elements.

It is colour that our brains register first, whether it be a new acquaintance (skincolour), a shirt, a house etc. Colour is such a dominant element that it is vital to know the various symbolic representations of different colours, in order to be a good designer.