D&AD: Little White Lies - Ideas

This was set by my university as a side-project to our main brief. It's not really my style of working given the art Little White Lies pick for their covers, but I gave it a good solid try. The deadline's now passed for the competition, but this was fun to work on anyway.

First, we were given a list of five films. Five films that I hadn't watched nor had I really got the urge to - Black Swan, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Drive, Super 8 and The Tree of Life. I'm not much of a movie person and I'll rarely sit and watch a film by myself. My first choice was Tinker Tailor, but I decided to pick The Tree of Life after it was the only DVD I could get hold of at the Library. I'd not really heard of the film or the director (like I said - not much of a movie person) but figured I'd give it a chance.

What a bore. It was like a two-hour long advert for Sky HD and a real struggle to sit through. I quite like Sean Penn as an actor but the soundtrack and cinematography were the only two good things about the movie. It was too late to pick another choice so I was kind of stuck with this one - but seeing as I did like the visuals, I could draw (haha) from that.

My first idea was horrible (so much so that I'm almost embarrassed that I brought it to crit - I'm not even sure if I should comb my Mac for the image and show you). I'd tried to go for a portrait of Sean Penn with Brad Pitt, especially as LWL like their portrait work, but it just didn't work whatsoever. So, I decided to go for something I knew I was better at - hands. I could be a little more realistic while keeping (some of) my style.

I was inspired by my finished Identity piece and the research behind it. Watercolour had worked really well there, and my tutors/fellow students had said that the piece felt more "dreamlike" than my first "portrait" attempt (which was done in acrylics). I started over with my watercolour set, some mount board and some hand references, and this is the finished product.

I was a little stuck for type later on so I put together my six ideas and asked for opinions on my Facebook page.

2 and 3 were popular - 4 was my personal favourite. A very good point was brought up later though, in that I need to think of the other space. It was definitely too cramped in 4 and 5 especially with the masthead, and 2 and 3 were better, but too close to the hand - so I'll be going ahead with 1 to be developed further for uni-work submission in May (6 still has the problem of the open space above the hand).

All in all - yep, an interesting brief to work on.