Illustration is not a skill I feel very confident in. I struggled with the unit a bit and also had a few issues keeping up with the workload for outside reasons. Thankfully, I still learned quite a lot from the last two weeks. Adobe Illustrator is easy to use once you understand how it works. That does take a bit, though.
My poster is for a special event lecture that won’t actually be held. As much as I would love to hear an academic talk about the politics of author Franz Kafka’s work, I can’t imagine that would draw a crowd large enough to fill Shreve Auditorium. In a perfect world, it might.
My inspiration is the feeling of isolation and alienation present in Kafka’s work. This often happens to his characters at the hands of cold, bureaucratic systems that do not and have never made sense. Kafka lived in a world when industrial capitalism was brand new and he seemed to be terrified of it.
In The Metamorphosis, when the main character wakes up to discover he’s been turned in to a bug, his first thought is that he will be late for work. The man seems insane for thinking everyone will still want him to go to work. The reader will likely find it funny and an example of the character being highly anxious.
It turns out that everyone actually does still expect him to go to work. In Kafka’s mind, the world makes demands of us that are just as strange.
With this in mind, I drew a little roach and directed the eye to it with two far larger elements, including an arrow that serves as a guiding line. The text being so large is meant to make the bug feel smaller in comparison and create a feeling of insignificance. From there, your eye goes to the informational text.
I wanted Kafka’s name to be a secondary point of focus. To do this, I made each letter its own element, and then gave the characters different sizes, colors, and “warp” settings. I worry the end result might be a bit too loud, but efforts to tone it down didn’t give me much.
My color scheme started with red. I wanted that to be the background. When I needed to make other choices, Illustrator suggested the browns and off-whites. The red background was most important to me. Along with the texture, I wanted to create a kind of dirty feeling that might remind someone of rust and old houses (or roaches).
Admittedly, this involved me drawing very little. I am proud of my roach, though. I used a reference image but didn’t trace it directly, which is not something I thought I had in me. I hope that this is a satisfactory drawn element. I was, admittedly, a little stressed and afraid of the pen tool.