Mega Crit

Today we had a Mega crit, I already had some ideas I wanted to apply to my project but the crit gave me a better understanding of my the work i have made so far fits the brief.

I want to go back to roughing and idea generation. I think I skipped the step to an extent, I roughed out a few compositions that I liked and started to make them straight away with cut paper and then adobe illustrator without fine tuning the designs. this has helped me in some ways, i have been able to experiment with colours and textures but I am not happy with the compositions and I think this has affected how I work with them rushing steps and making do. I have reused characters from other work to test out one of the compositions because i wanted to see how it would work but trying to force and image to fit the composition looks messy and only put me off the idea. I need to step back and consider all aspects of my compositions before I jump in the deep end.

From the feedback the strongest themes or messages are "the struggle of being a teenager" and "passing from childhood to adolescence". I want to make this the basis of my book cover as I think it is the basis of the book, there are many issues that Adrian Mole tackles throughout the book but that is the overarching struggle. 

The suggestions I received are mainly based around experimentation. I agree with all the comments, I need to experiment with colour, media and composition. I don't want to add much detail to the cover as it has to include a large amount of text which is something I haven't included in my images up to this point. I hadn't realised quite how much text there is until I saw other peoples work. i will need to find a way to tie the text into the image, I don't want image and text to act like two separate entities.

I was thinking of making the title of the book out of the characters hair or the lettering stuck in his hair. The title is so long I don't think it can sidelined next to an image and if I keep the two separate it will overpower the image. I will need to work out roughs to see how I can solve this problem through different compositions and colour schemes.

I think I need to work out the scale for this image and make more characters to make up the background. This is the image where I have recycled some characters and they don't suite the composition. I want the characters to look almost like trees in the background. I think I have made the Adrian Mole character too complex for his size, I want to make his character and emotion clear and need to find a way to to that while maintaining his appearance. I will have to sacrifice some detail but would ideally like to keep his hair, glasses and the diary.

Back to the drawing board.