Here’s the final version that I sent to Time Out, but I still feel that it isn’t completely right, especially the colours which I applied quite thoughtfully and enjoyed bleeding in with the ink pen and sometimes out of the lines to get across the fluid feeling of storytelling (I loved the way Shukman described his novel in the article and the vivid imagery of it’s excerpets picked out by the article writer). Maybe the colours are not bright enough? I made them a little brighter in Photoshop but I didn’t want to overwork the image in Photoshop so I only made subtle changes.
January 21, 2008 at 9:55 pm
It answers the brief! The dude is telling us about his travels. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the colours…in fact over-saturating would probably turn the whole thing into a Martin Parr-esque disaster.
Very good perspective and a very nice, simple, clean idea.
January 22, 2008 at 11:35 am
I know what you mean about the colour. Watercolors just don’t give you the intensity you want sometimes. I agree with Nina though, too much tweaking in Photoshop would have just made it look gross. I think the colours still look good, they seem very Peruvian. The composition has a nice circular thing going too, that leads your eye around the image.
February 3, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I’m glad you’ve said that the composition leads you around the page! Thats kind of how I planned it, the potted tree behind him is meant to reflect the rainforest in the top left corner and the grey city at the bottom left is meant to parrallel the ancient lost city in the top right corner in a sort of conflict between dull-modern urbanity and exotic ancient civilisations and locations. Maybe I was inserting too much of my own opinions into it but I don’t think it matters because its so subtle and anyway thats what Shukman felt like in the article, he’s unable to live in England for example and chooses to live in Latin America.