Reflection on my previous project

Alice Cooper Special Forces Sketch

My previous project was a visual narrative. It had gone through many changes, in the beginning I wanted to create some posters for Alice Cooper songs that were less famous (specifically from the early 80's albums).

However I was finding it difficult to separate myself from the imagery already created within the lyrics. As Alice Cooper had been a presence throughout all of my life (my father was a massive fan) I decided to Illustrate my memories of certain songs in context of what was going on in my life at the time. For example, Give the Kid a Break was called 'Woolie and the Devil' for me as a child. my father used to pretend it was Woolie (my favorite stuffed animal) and all of my other toys singing the song!

Woolie and the Devil Illustration

Woolie

I began creating a series of ink paintings, picking out interesting parts of the songs and combining them with things I remember from my house as a child. After working in this way for a while I found that it was becoming more and more a narrative. I tried to find a way to link them together somehow, perhaps a visual diary? 

Illustration to the Alice Cooper song Former Lee Warmer

Once again I found this difficult, there was too much information to try and illustrate, so I decided to focus only on the relationship between my father and myself. This resulted in the narrative Lines. The story itself is about the death of my Grandfather and how my Father reacted to this. It was effectively a breakdown of communication.

Lines Sketch

I was looking for ways to illustrate this without it being an obvious graphic novel style narrative. Taking leads from my previous narrative, I started planning out storyboards, constantly evolving, editing and re writing the story. In the end I over simplified everything to the emotions of loss and confusion.


The telephone lines represent communication, but they are in some ways old technology, especially with the internet and mobile phones. I wanted to use a somewhat older technology to show this break down, this why I also used pay phones.

Lines Sketch

I also used birds to show the splintering of my fathers sanity. I chose other metaphors, for example the moon. This was also important because I remember how he used to compare the song The Man in the Moon by Adrian Belew to his situation. I found it ironic at the time that he would take so much comfort from the moon as it is often something that symbolizes lunacy. I found that this metaphor worked on a visual and personal level.

 I feel my emotional attachment to the story made it perhaps more dark then I initially intended, it also made it hard overall as a project, especially to illustrate these emotions that are still so close to me.

A selection of pages from Lines

Overall I was pleased with how the book came out. However I would have benefited with some final editing help. Some of the pages were really successful and looked great as a double page spread. Others I was not so pleased with, but only for minor reasons.

The Binding itself was frustrating, I originally made a mock up book and everything turned out fine, but when it came to binding the final piece, the whole thing seemed to go wrong and, unfortunately, fell apart soon after! I did, however, learn a valuable lesson from this, make two copies!

The cover was pretty bad, I couldn't get it to print out correctly on the brown paper!

My second issue was the paper quality. The print turned out really dull, even though the paper itself was a nice weight, the blacks were so dull a lot of the texture was lost. I tried a second print on different paper but I felt that it was too shiny and looked equally as home made. For future projects I will research into better papers, but more likely, go to a professional printer.

Inside of the book

 I felt the ink drawings worked well, but I would have liked to have mixed in more collage. I felt that some of the images needed a more graphic edge to them, perhaps the telephone lines themselves. I will consider a better mix of collage and ink painting in my next project.