The Bee Express

Visual Language Transport brief

Practical Task:

Rough out with thumbnails

Then refined to a finished piece

An illustration of transport

Compositionally, look to employ a strong/dynamic/interesting line of sight. As well as consideration for other compositional mechanics, such as viewpoint, depth and frame - format of my choosing, working in monochrome.

I want my piece to tell a more unusual/fairytale sort of story so I decided to pick bees for my transport because its not something everyone would think of first when someone says transport. I played around with the order of the foreground, mid ground and background elements in my thumbnails - changing the order around to see what would look better (e.g bee in the foreground, or flowers etc). It was quite difficult get a strong sense of line of sight with the flowers because it's not possible to place them in an organised/ordered way as flowers don't grow that way. So I decided to look back at the Bambi examples for inspiration and decided to try it this way: 

This composition works better than the previous thumbnails I'd done because even though the flowers still go in all different directions, the way that its placed to one side creates a more visible line of sight and creates a clearer space to place the transportation in the piece. This space allows the bee to be seen quite easily, which helps to give an area of focus on the bee and its little passenger. I also came to a final decision to have the foreground flowers look really big compared to the flowers at the back to create a sense of depth.

I made my more refined one digitally on photoshop - As the task said to work in monochrome, I decided to work in greyscale first. I quite like the thumbnails where the flowers actually went off the frame as it made it look like its coming at you, which I thought was quite interesting, so this is what I did. I then decided to adjust the levels and change the hue so that the contrast between the flowers and background appears stronger and more visible - to do this I converted the image to cymk mode first (but when I printed it out, it still turned out a different colour, which really annoys me because none of my prints so far have turned out the way I want it to!)