Drive. Screenprint.
Here’s my final and ultimately unsuccessful entry into this year’s D&AD Illustration Student Competition. The deadline and results were a while ago, but I’m just starting to organise my file folders and clearing things out post assessment hand-in (and competition rules said they didn’t want finals going up online before the results were announced).
The Brief was to create a portrait for Little White Lies magazine of one of the main characters from their list of 5 ‘best’ films of 2011. The choices were Black Swan, Drive, The Tree of Life, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Super 8. I chose Drive. The Brief called for a straightforward depiction of the main character, but I thought that a bit too restricting. I thought that if I just drew an image of Ryan Gosling, and D&AD received hundreds of drawings of Ryan Gosling, there wouldn’t be much to set my work apart. So, I decided to construct his face out of Mustang car parts (apparently I like making faces out of other images)
The character doesn’t have a name, and cars are obviously a huge part of the film, so I thought this image made him seem anonymous, a bit cold, and it contains various other objects from the film - there’s a hammer, a bullet, a watch (and more) within the car parts. I wanted to make an image you’d have to look at for longer than just a drawing of his face.
Unfortunately, I suppose that really wasn’t what they were looking for, so it didn’t get shortlisted or nominated or anything. Disappointed, but to be expected - it was a little bit of a risk. Two of my very talented classmates did get nominated however, and you can see their work on their own blogs http://rupertsmissenillustration.tumblr.com/ and http://staceyknights.tumblr.com/
I was happy with my image, and it will hopefully be up on the wall at my Degree Show, but in a much larger format. I screenprinted a run of 25 of these images, and they’re A2 in size. They will be available to buy (and will hopefully sell) at the show, I just need to work out how much to price them at. I’ve never been good at that. Don’t want to overprice them as I want to sell them, (I have no room for them), but then I would like to make my money back on the expense of having to reprint acetate that the print technicians at uni got wrong.
Here’s the initial A4 print, how the image looked with the magazine logo on it, and a photo of the A2 print. It was too big to scan, and I’ve always wanted to have a photo holding a print like that, makes it seem artier, ha.
