The Work Produced!
| This piece is a response to Linda Straw’s beautiful quilt ‘All the World’s A Stage!’ The illustration produced for this brief is an A4 sized digital piece (210x297mm) that I have created in photoshop, the illustration itself taking over 10 hours to finish due to the larger size of the canvas. I was heavily inspired by the composition of Straw’s quilt; I loved the lighting possibilities the setting posed as well as the rich variety of characters and detailing. I wanted my illustration to visibly have that connection to the quilt whilst remaining original in a matter of speaking – referencing various parts of the quilt whilst containing new characters and new little details of my own; for instance like with Straw’s quilt I put myself into this image, I also added the patterns on the curtains on her quilt into the flags in the back as well as adding some of the characters seen in her piece into mine. For the characters I did use, I took inspiration from Shakespeare’s work—due to the connection to his plays in the original; for instance, the most notable characters seen are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are seen with Bottom from Midsummer’s Night Dream on the left, and to the right there’s Iago and Emilia from Othello. |
The Journey of the Illustration! At the beginning of this project I have to admit I was quite nervous; textiles are something I’ve always been interested in, but I’ve never had to draw a response to a quilt before. As a huge fan of theatre, I instantly found myself drawn to ‘All the World’s a Stage’ due to its connection to the father of theatre, Shakespeare. Upon lengthy consideration, I decided to start experimenting with the concept of All The World’s a Stage, taking these beautiful characters and reimagining them to represent characters from Shakespeare’s plays. I soon found however that reinforcing the comedic element of the original quilt was quite integral to reimagining Straw’s beautiful work—however I didn’t want to redraw or reuse characters, I wanted my piece to be able to stand alone but of course still having a clear visual inspiration taken from Straw’s quilt, thusly I decided to try think outside the box with how I would incorporate this element of comedy. At first I was pondering including characters from Oscar Wilde’s plays, but eventually decided to mix together this satirical element of Straw’s work with her beautiful use of small detailing and references—crafting little easter eggs throughout for theatre fans to find!
Top ,.. top top … post! Keep the good work on !