Exercise - Image Development

For this exercise I chose to work with a piece by David Wenzel, who is known, primarily, for his illustration work on the graphic novel, 'The Hobbit'.

I have included below a small biography on him, and a couple of images from 'The Hobbit', but for more of his work please click on the link to his website.

The piece of work I chose, is called Ivans Hat, and is an image full of detail in the background, so I thought it would be good for this exercise.

I used the 'L' shaped pieces of card to produce ten images in several different formats.

The titles that I have used, I think do represent the content, one or two of them were slightly more abstract than the others, but on the whole I think anyone looking at them may be able to see, what I can see.

After much thought, I chose the image titled 'Takeaway', because I loved the quirkiness of it, the man with the large pizza shaped hat suggested something you may see on an advertisement for a fast food outlet.

I tried out several different typeface, using the word 'Takeaway', then sketched a few poster layout ideas, with the image, text etc in different places.

Then I sketched the image a couple of times so that I could try out methods of colouring, producing one with acrylics and one with watercolour and pen, because the original image was done with watercolour washes I thought that it might be good to do the same.

I decided to go with a variation on the first and second poster ideas I had sketched roughly, with the image at the top, text underneath, which was the Book Antiqua typeface, and a border of pizza topping ingredients around it.

I did not want a printed text, so I copied the text to the best of my ability, and painted it in red, which with the green border, are the two most important colours used normally to promote a traditional pizzeria, because they are part of the Italian Flag.

The pizza slice underneath is an extra I wanted to add, so that there was not a large gap on the poster.

In conclusion I am quite pleased with the end image, as I think I worked my way through this exercise well, trying to match the style and content of the original image, rather than changing it too much, so that it lost its original identity.
I think I extended the meaning in the poster, so that the man went from just wearing a large pizza shaped hat, to being someone who promotes food.