The Airs of Solomon: A Visual essay supplement.
background.
“The airs of Solomon” is a short story written by author Denise Dailey. The base of the story was about a boy who had lost his mother and the journey this young boy takes in order to locate her. A particular scene that stood out in my reading of the story was when the boy would burrow himself inside a fish filled fishing net, wait until the seagulls would come along and lift him lift away the net. By doing this, the boy would be able to search for his lost mother from the sky. When the seagulls took the boy to flight, all that could be seen of the boy was his “blue” legs sticking out of the bottom of the net.
concept.
The idea behind the design was to focus on the particular scene in the story, illustrate it and use the illustration to design a magazine spread for the short story. To start, I created an illustration using lead and colored pencils of the boy in the fish filled fishing net. I chose not to incorporate any color except for the powder blue color describing his legs, as in the story. The illustration was then scanned and placed into this gridded design. The left portion incorporated the illustration along with the basic information about the short story (title, author, ext). The background of that was a gradient of gray to blue in order to emphasize the blue of the boys legs. A vector design of the seagulls were place surrounding the net, to blend this hand drawn element with computer based elements. One last seagull was used in the left portion, this time it would be cut out from the text “Short Story”.
The right portion incorporated the bulk of the text of the story (not the original text). It was split up into two columns to make the readers eyes move easier through it. Once again the text was split up by a perfect blue square placed in the center of the page, which would bring the element of color into text, and invoke this idea of the sky. More of the vector based seagulls would be placed on top of the square, growing in size from the bottom right portion to the upper left portion, which would give the idea they were coming out of the page.
“The airs of Solomon” is a short story written by author Denise Dailey. The base of the story was about a boy who had lost his mother and the journey this young boy takes in order to locate her. A particular scene that stood out in my reading of the story was when the boy would burrow himself inside a fish filled fishing net, wait until the seagulls would come along and lift him lift away the net. By doing this, the boy would be able to search for his lost mother from the sky. When the seagulls took the boy to flight, all that could be seen of the boy was his “blue” legs sticking out of the bottom of the net.
concept.
The idea behind the design was to focus on the particular scene in the story, illustrate it and use the illustration to design a magazine spread for the short story. To start, I created an illustration using lead and colored pencils of the boy in the fish filled fishing net. I chose not to incorporate any color except for the powder blue color describing his legs, as in the story. The illustration was then scanned and placed into this gridded design. The left portion incorporated the illustration along with the basic information about the short story (title, author, ext). The background of that was a gradient of gray to blue in order to emphasize the blue of the boys legs. A vector design of the seagulls were place surrounding the net, to blend this hand drawn element with computer based elements. One last seagull was used in the left portion, this time it would be cut out from the text “Short Story”.
The right portion incorporated the bulk of the text of the story (not the original text). It was split up into two columns to make the readers eyes move easier through it. Once again the text was split up by a perfect blue square placed in the center of the page, which would bring the element of color into text, and invoke this idea of the sky. More of the vector based seagulls would be placed on top of the square, growing in size from the bottom right portion to the upper left portion, which would give the idea they were coming out of the page.
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