Friday 13 February 2015

Thresholds of Greater Misery

Finally reached the stage of mocking up a physical copy of the zine. Here are some pictures:





It's 16 A5 pages, but not all of the images are final and I'm going to add more in the finished version. The response I got was positive but I was advised to use more lampshade imagery as a throughline for the work and think of a more engaging cover. I'm thinking of doing varient covers for the four copies I need to make.


These are some book binding tests.I tried about seven. For the printed mock up I went with a standard staple binding, but I think I'm going to use thread band binding for the final version.


This is the current front and back cover. It's kind of a placeholder at the moment but I still quite like it. I want to do more images that incorporate text as a halftone pattern.



These are some more photomontage images, this time of postmodern philosophers. I like the idea of using multiple images to literally explore the different sides of a person.



These two use type and imagery associated with 20th century writers to explore postmodernism from a literary angle. I like the sentiment but I'm still thinking of ways to take them further. There's so much blank space in these images and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

In Which We Discover Our Hero and the Monster Are One and the Same

Here's a typographic poster for the zine:


These are experiments in photomontage:

They're both of William S. Burroughs. I'm not sure they're any good, but making them reminded me of the jagged style of Saul Bass and I realised that aesthetic would be perfect for visualising a disintegrating perception of objective reality. I'm not sure if Bass could be considered a postmodernist, but his work ranges from high to low art and he seemed to address modernity in a subjective way, so his influence isn't out of the blue. I went about making my own responses to his work:


This is a part of a monologue I've begun to write to see if I can tie together the zine with a narrative.


This one is kind of influenced by Hitchcock's Vertigo and its use of green and red. It's supposed to be a rose, which I see as a classical icon, but when rendered like this I think turns it into something more modern and abstracted.



Not really sure about this one. I couldn't settle on a colour I liked best so I just added both of them.



This one I like because of the ambiguity of it. It's almost a Jackson Pollock painting, yet it's explicitly geometric and objective.

I want to take these further and try making traditional versions but I also really want to make some Hockneyesque photomontages out of lots of photographs of the same place. Finding a suitable direction is a challenge.