i keep making things. last year, during my work on The Bite, my editorial uni project about vampires, i wrote a short story about the painful physical process of turning into a vampire, and very early on i started to want to illustrate it. but for a long time, i couldn't quite figure out a style -- or, the hazy, naturalistic style i had in mind for it wasn't really one i was very good at drawing in. so i didn't think about it for a while, instead focusing on other things. finally, in late july, i had a flash vision of something collaged and thought, well yes. why not collage? so i made some collages. and now it exists in real life.
i did always want this to be black and white. so the chromatic non-uniformity of collage wasn't really an issue, i just had to be sure they would work in b&w. i made 17 collages, of which i used 15. i'm gonna show you the ones i didn't end up including and then some of my favourites.
these i didn't use, for different reasons. on the left is what would've been the very first illustration in the booklet, but i felt like it didn't quite capture the vibe of the story enough to really work as a first illustration. i think it could've worked somewhere later on, but not as a first impression. though i do like it in itself. the right one, i just wasn't very happy with. i like the visual of the spidery shadows of eyelashes against cheeks, but i didn't manage to realise it very well here. plus, i glued the foreground element the wrong way around down onto the background, not covering up what i wanted covered up (that spot of light at the top) and had to cut away a good chunk, taking away from the vertical format i'd wanted for this one.
this is probably my favourite. it's the last one (safe for the cover) i made and the one i was most unsure/scared/hesitant of making, because i had a vague idea for exposed, somewhat mutated/altered anatomy and spiky bones along a body but had no concrete material to work with. but i think this came together really well in the end.
ok actually, this and the last one may be tied for first place. i just love how the edges of the two pictures for the base layer fit together here. b&w definitely unifies it and makes for a smoother look but i do love the colour contrast between the orange and green here. it's not exactly faithful to the line from the story it references (A sleep fitful with dreams of morphing shapes, reminiscent of bats one moment, transmuting into vermin the next, into wolves, into fog, into you, into me.) but that's also kind of what made working on this project fun, having to work with the material i have on hand and taking liberties to adapt the text in the ways i am able to. i don't have a printer at home, and the next one is a couple of hours worth of going outside away, so i couldn't just find things online to print out and i couldn't make copies of an asset or print different sized versions. i had to make do with what i had and take risks in using all these images i only had a single one of. i used to not like collage because of this, because (unless you're doing the kinda collage where you cut everything out of clean coloured paper) you just can't really plan them and you don't have much influence over how things fit together and you have to just figure it out as you go. now i kind of love it for this same reason. it's freeing now.
another favourite. i just like the composition, it's very simple but it just works. and i liked editing the posture of the hand, i like how that turned out. in print, the format is less drastic, but i think i like this extra long format more.
printed the booklet in riso again, just in black, and it printed beautifully, and i love the format (18x11cm). i don't have pictures of it rn but i might add them in a few weeks when i have access to a copy of it again (away from home for my internship rn). and in the meantime, you can look at the digital version, if you want. read it, too. let me know how you like it.
ok that's it for now. make a collage today.
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