Margaret Atwood Thumbnails

Hello Everyone,

I just thought I should take a moment to introduce myself and get this blog a'rolling. I'm Steven Alphonse and I'm a graphic designer/illustrator/cartoonist and I'm going to be using this space primarily to document and share the work I'm currently doing as well as let you, the viewer, get a bit of a look at how I create things behind the scenes.

To start things off I just wanted to post a set of thumbnails I did for a poster I'm designing for International Women's Day.

As you can see from the handy little title on that first thumbnail the subject of my poster is award winning Canadian authour Margaret Atwood. And as you can also see from looking at the rest of these thumbnails things are pretty rough and sketchy right now. I did these mostly to lay down some concepts and play with composition, so while they may not be much now they're hopefully going to turn into something fairly nice

My first idea for this poster was actually inspired by a recently done series of redesigns for the covers of Atwoods back catalogue. The general recurring theme of these redesigns was that the organic bits of the people on the cover were photographs while their clothing was drawn in a much more minimalistic, sparse style. I thought it might be an interesting design option to mimic for the poster, though with hand painted elements replacing the photographs.

My next idea took inspiration from an old illustration by the spectacular Al Parker. I simply love the way the smaller figures in the illustration are interacting with the main portraits hair and thought I could incorporate a similar interaction into one of my ideas. My basic thought is to have Atwood as the main focus of the poster with several characters and elements of her various writings sort of "springing forth" from her head.

My final idea also took a cue from Al Parker and an illustration he did for TV guide. My thought was to incorporate the very rough, textured approach he took to this illustration and apply it to a double portrait of Ms Atwood: One portrait representing herself as a young authour at the start of her career, the other representing her as she is presently.

Needless to say I still have a fair bit of work ahead of me, but I will keep you all updated as I continue

Update: I've done a second batch of thumbnails for this project that include more typographical elements integrated into the overall design