Brief#1
Collect as many examples of visual metaphor as you can find. Often metaphors are used within political and issue-based works to give complex or subtle ideas greater clarity. For this reason you are likely to trace them more easily within editorial contexts: newspapers and articles in magazines.
These are some of the visual metaphors that caught my eye.
Next I was asked to select and create a visual metaphor from a list of words.
- Reaching retirement
- Dreams of romance
- Broken relationship
- Censorship of the press
- High achievement
- Economic catastrophe
I decided to chose “Broken Relationship”, then I started sketching some ideas. I wasn’t sure how to approach this exercise. So I started drawing rough sketches of the concepts that came to my mind when I thought about a “broken relationship”, until I liked one of them:
I liked this idea because it represents how we do not see or know everything that is going on in other peoples life and relationships. And now a days, the majority of us, we put our lives on the internet using social media. But, consciously or not, we are creating a version of what we would like our lives to be like, including our relationships. Therefore, I created an illustration that represented the people standing (what we show the world) and their shadows (what I really going on).
After staring at this drawing I came to the conclusion that, at the same time, this illustration could represent domestic violence. And how it is something that occurs behind doors, that most likely no one knows a bout. What people see is the couple standing together holding hands and not the abusive behaviour that is represented in the shadows.
Then I started creating the final illustration:
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this exercise, even tough at the beginning I was a little bit confused, once I started developing the sketch I couldn’t stop. In the process of developing many ideas came to my head about how it could be represented and views by different people.
