niccic

The Hope of Loving:posted 18 july 2007

Anchor Books

‘The Hope of Loving’ has a romantic design outlook, like it’s characters it tries to escape the structure and formality common to most picture book experiences. It’s a modern illustrative interpretation of a poem that was composed before computers came into existence.

Through an integration of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I created a semi-realistic environment. Scanning and importing photographs created the desired esthetic, the trees for example don’t look entirely like trees but they’re composed from real leaves creating a distorted sense of realism. This illustrative style allowed me to place subtle details in images, things like particular posters and clothing giving the characters a defined persona, a certain type of life style and cultural influences; this is made quite obvious in the illustrations of their rooms. I think one of the benefits of this style is it creates a stronger emotional responses with particular viewers who share the same lifestyle or possessions.

Obviously ‘The hope of Loveing’ will appeal to some viewers because of its focus on two young alternative characters, but despite this I think its appealing to a broad audience, most people can relate to the feeling of loneliness. All humans desire to belong, the sense of not fitting, not belonging causes us to wither in ourselves. *Fuller

The cover designs text’s is appropriately created with love hearts, I wanted something very simple with a balance between black and white, on one hand white space evoking thoughts of , humility, birth, marriage, on the other black has underlying feeling of coldness and sterility from living without love. The image below the title is an artistic interpretation of the characters desire to experience love, like the temptation of a kiss or even the simple desire to be close to someone.

The poem doesn’t explore the happiness of love, rather our response to not receiving it, because of this; the majority of the images were de-saturated to show life without love also giving the images a sexuality, sophistication, and a sense of unhappiness. Note that on the last page were the characters embrace colour is slightly saturated into the image. The climax conveniently occurs on the last page and this is shown by the loss of the boarders representing the freedom of their self confinement from love.

The blue horizontal lines are a tasty esthetic that’s aimed to engage the viewer on a more personal level, similar to lines you find on note paper which invites viewers to embrace the book as if they could write or draw on it adding to the creation. As with most UNI projects there are things that I would like to change. There are little glitches here and there, boarders that are to strong and so forth, but despite this I feel the book has a lot of relevance to people today “…We live in a time of great loneliness. There is a crisis in belonging…. How many of you have had the sense that you are living the life of a drifter, a purposeless, empty nomad, wandering from event to event, person to person, unable to settle and rest anywhere too long… *Fuller

*Fuller, Andrew. Belonging and Relationships. Garden City: Anchor Books, 2002