A2 Poster

Concept

In an extract of speech from Ellen MacArthur she says 'My boat was my world'. So in my sketchbook when I was being playful and testing with ideas, I liked the notion of literally depicting her boat as a world, by making it look like a planet and putting it into the solar system. this of course is also a little symbolic of her sailing around the world, for which she is most famous for.

 Compositional Decisions

I did a lot of drawings on tracing and detail paper, and in my sketchbook, then I began piecing it together on photoshop. I was having some quite major difficulties originally as I originally though the piece had to be A1, so I was scanning in my artwork perhaps at far to high a resolution, and had apparently accidentally created a photoshop file that was essentially 6 meters big, no wonder it was being far to big to save or even load! 

To make the planets and the images look clearer I experimented with making the background much darker, so that the planets and the sun would look more vibrant and be much clearer. I think this was tiny bit successful at least. It was a compromise trying to find the balance though, as I was keen not too lose too much of the inky and colourful textures of the background sky, or space.

Printed Proof

I this poster out to a smaller scale several times to try to grasp a sense of what composition works best. I've had a bit of a struggle with this composition, I just cant seem to get it to feel right at all. I like this one, but the sun and the boat come much too close to the edge of the boarder, it doesn't look like its in outer space at all. 

I made the planets and everything much smaller, and so now I feel that at least the image is a little clearer, and it does give a much better sense of space. I still think it's far from perfect, but a deadline is a deadline, and it still conveys my basic concept, even if the details are not quite perfect to me. In many ways I think that I prefer the look of the image above, but it isn't quite communicating right, and perhaps wouldn't make sense to people that do not know my idea like I do (that sounds silly). I'm happy with a lot of the colours and textures of this piece.