Authors - The Metaphor

I loved this session, I got really into thinking about metaphors for things and felt that it was really helping me to develop new and interesting ideas which totally avoided the cliche things I had already been doing. The idea of considering the intangible was something I hadn't really thought abut before because I usually focus on drawing objects or things that are easily definable and visible. 

This was a good task to get ideas flowing, even though it wasn't related to my project yet, it put me in the thinking frame of mind and really benefitted me afterwards when I did the same exercise for themes relating to Agatha Christie. 

I have circled some words in yellow as I think they may have potential for some interesting ideas. I took some of these words and started making some roughs of how these could be turned into images.

Chat with Teresa

I spoke to Teresa about the metaphors I had come up with for my author and the general themes in her novels. She mentioned that there is a lot of two-faced behaviour present in Christie's novels which could lead to some simple yet effective images. From this I thought about 'backstabbing' and whether I could draw this literally to represent it, and whether it needed to be a human back of if I could use an animal to show the character of each person in the situation. She also mentioned colour which is something I advent considered properly yet because I tend to work in black and white. The work for this brief needs to be of limited colour so I think I need to research into colours of the time Christie was writing and also colours which could represent her themes to build up a strong, meaningful colour palette to work with. 

I like the idea of moving away from the poison bottles to show poison and instead looking at the poison inside the body, it could show a liquid killing the insides. I was thinking about how I could show it spreading into the body and this led to something looking like the root system of a tree. Family is a key theme in Christie's novels so it could be used to show how the poison is killing the family structure. 

Trees in general seem to be a theme I can link to a lot of things in Christie's work so I can keep this in mind when developing new concepts. 

I looked at the idea of interference because in the last book I finished (A Murder is Announced), the murderer was doing things to change the pathway of a large inheritance. Some of these scamps show how interfering with a planned structure changes its course. I prefer the one with the shelves to the river one because I think it has more mileage when thinking about bringing in visual symbols. 

This drawing below stemmed from some roughs where the tangled knot represents the confusion and challenge of the murder mystery and as it untangles it draws out a clue or blatant solution to the problem. 

Going back to the tree idea...



I added in the keyhole to show the restricted view of the detective at the beginning of the story and then the tree behind / inside it to show the true complexity of the situation. I think there is a lot more to be done with the tree symbol, I think I could push this quite far. 

This is getting me a bit more excited about this brief now, I feel like I am coming out of the rut of just drawing what I am reading.