Week 2

In this week's session, the example we was given the book named The Arrival by Shaun Tan and we had to create illustrations that displayed a feeling of loss, discovery and return. In his work you can see that he uses little to no words which makes the readers focus more on each little detail in the images to know the story. He created his characters for the story by using life models as the references which works really well for what his book since it shows a realistic, detailed image so the audience can tell more from it.

For my task we had to created 3 - 4 editorial images with the intent of using visual metaphors to communicate complex emotional responses and the content we was given to base these illustrations on was an Indonesian couple who lost their son and daughter during the tsunami but reunited with them years later.  For this I made three quick sketches, the first one is showing a mirror image with the left side representing the tsunami snatching and taking the children away from the parents while the other side shows the tsunami disappearing as the family reunites to show that the tsunami is no longer affecting their lives. The second image I created was representing the tsunami as some kind of monster that has taken the kids in his hands and away from the parents but shows the little girl has escaped from its clutches and had reunited with the parents while the little boy watches it happen which is meant to show when the boy saw the news story about the family reuniting. Finally my last image was similar to the first by using a mirror image but this time I illustrated it as two family photos with the left side showing the family nearly submerged in water and looking depressed to show how the tsunami had affected them while on the right side it shows the whole family smiling with no water in sight which is again to show that the tsunami is no longer affecting them since they have reunited. I slightly enjoyed this project because it challenged me to think of how to create an entire visual story in only one image, however it proved more challenging than I thought which made me dislike it as well.