Mini Art School Part 3

For this week's art school, I picked exercises from Color Echo and Thematic Agreement. For the second of these, the task was to create a book cover for something called 'Flirting with the Bully'. The theme, age group, etc was completely up to us and I decided to try subverting the expectations a bit with this. Instead of 'flirt' as in romance, I opted instead for a takeoff of 'flirting with death'. In my mind's eye, this book is about a teen who has frustrations in his life and ends up taking them out his peers who don't deserve it. This person finds himself walking down a line towards being a person that he doesn't like, but at the same time he can't quite stop himself. I thought this picture on the right had a lot of promise, so I cropped it to focus only on the skateboarder. This worked perfectly for what I wanted by not showing the person's face, the person departing from the viewer, and the prominent display of his shadow or 'darker side'. This book is an urban look at some of the darker themes of growing up. It's not a fluffy look so for the wording I chose simple black with thick lettering. The fonting on the lower case ls keep it from being too boring and the author's name is completely overshadowed by the title. It felt like it needed just a bit more than that though so I added a quip in a lower corner. Just to make sure, I tried showing this blindly to a couple of people with the prompt 'if you saw a book like this and didn't know the summary, what would you think its about?' and they all more or less came up with what I was going for which I consider to be a big success.

The other two prompts were the mandatory crop and Color Echo. You can see the results of the cropping at the bottom which I'm happy with but don't have much to say about. Color Echo was about taking an image and selecting colors from it to use as a background. You can see how I progress from left to right. I'm much happier with the right most version since that's where I realized I could accentuate the swirling parts of the bottles with ovals. For the cropping I did some mixes between medium far and close shots and posed them all together. I saved them in a .gif with a transparent background, but it seems this blog doesn't like those. I will continue to struggle with the white backgrounds on this blog but in the meanwhile enjoy the corn, wheat, barley, and other crops.