Week 2- The arrival

For this week, we were asked to prepare for the session by visually de- constructing and defining the ref point (The Arrival) and its use of metaphor

Image 1

Image 2

Analysing the above images 
image 1- 
- Black and white- cold, unsettling
- Large, unusual mysterious architecture
- people look tiny in comparison to city- to show emotions of feeling lost in an un-known world
- Fog in the sky, shows overpopulation and pollution- perhaps a contrast to where they come from
-built up city, lack of country side and colours of nature colour 

Image 2
-    Sepia tone- again not friendly, however slightly warmer than black and white, suggesting they are beginning to feel more excited than scared and un-welcome.
-  Still un usual architecture and scenery- still an alien and different world. 
- the buildings are some what fanatic, as if being seen thought the eyes of a child.    
- lots of smoke and chimneys, to show the pollution 
- lots of roads, to show it is a built up busy city
- the image consists mainly of shapes and geometry 
- un-usual viewpoint

I then visually de-constructed these images using thumbnails, picking out certain aspects of the illustrations which stood out to me.     

Image 1

Image 2

After analysing the reference point we were some content, from which we had to create 3 drawings which communicated complex emotions through visual metaphor. 
The content was this 
An Indonesian couple who were reunited with their daughter 10 years after a tsunami snatched her from their arms now claim to have found their son, who was also swept away in the disaster.

Jamaliah and Septi Rangkuti had an emotional reunion with the teenager they believe is their son on Monday, bringing their whole family together for the first time in 10 years.

Arif Pratama Rangkuti was carried off with his younger sister when a tsunami hit Indonesia‘s westernmost Aceh province in 2004, killing more than 170,000 people there and tens of thousands in other countries.

Arif’s sister, Raudhatul Jannah, was reunited with the parents in June after a relative spotted a girl in an Aceh village who bore a striking resemblance.

On Tuesday the couple said their son, now 17, had also been returned, thanks to media coverage of the reunion with their daughter. “It’s true, he’s our son. We’re now preparing to take him home,” Septi Rangkuti said.

Using this content we had to communicate the feeling of loss, discovery and reunion, whilst referring to the reference point for guidance. 

To do this I chose an aspects of Shaun tan's The arrival which I found effective and used it in my own work. I find his use of colour very interesting, so decided to use this as the base of my way of visually expressing emotion. 

For the first image I decided to use little colour, with the majority of the drawing in black and white. I think that Shaun tan uses sepia and black and white tones to create an un-settling, cold atmosphere to his Art, as this expresses the emotions of fear and loneliness the immigrants in his illustration would be feeling. I felt that this is similar to the emotion I am trying to portray in my first drawing. The lack of colour represents the despair of the parents, their children have be taken away from them, and so with them all the joy colour brings to the world. The only colour present in the drawing is red, as red has connotations of blood spillage, death and anger. I used a vibrant red spot colour to represent the intense emotions surrounding tragedy and contrasted it to the dull, dark wreckage of their home behind them. I wanted to show, that death, involves both the overwhelming darkness of depression from the loss of loved ones and the intense anger you'd experience from being inflicted with such injustice, The red represents this.

 In the second image I used very much the same technique, but to display a much happier emotion. This image illustrates the moment when the parent see their daughter for the first time after thinking they had lost her. I used spot colour again but this time I drew all of the girl in colour and left the background black and white. I wanted the focus point of the drawing to be on the girl as I feel that it reflects how the parents would feel when they saw her. All of their attention would be on her and the background would be a blur, featuring nothing of importance compared to the girl stood in front of them. 

The last image represents the happiness they would feel at all being reunited, Hence why I created a vibrant colourful image with all the family members present. 

I enjoyed this topic and found it interesting exploring portraying emotion with visual metaphor, I would like to go back and adjust the illustrations slightly, as I would like to portray more emotion in the facial expressions of the people. As a composition I think they work well as a running sequence (shown below) However I would like to adjust the background of the final image as I can see that it does quite fit in with the others and needs more detail.