Hey guys, I'm sadly looking to wrap up this blog soon but I have two more posts that I'm super excited to put out.
The first being this!
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Welcome back everyone! So on my spare time I decided(was told) to delve into my artistic side and create an alternate book cover for The Giver! I'm going to explain why I designed it the way it is, and will do so through addressing some of my personal ideas, as well as basic codes and conventions that I was taught in my prestigious English class this semester.
Goal: I wanted to create a cover that represented what feelings and ideas I got from reading the book. Personally, I believed a theme centered on the purity of life without emotions, was a big part of what made the life within the community so disconcerting to me. Being the hot tempered, but jolly person that I am, all of the people I have relationships with understand how I act, and they react in turn with their own displays of emotion. This back and forth can take the shape in laughter, anger, frustration, miscommunication, shouting, happiness and so much more. This dynamic aspect of my relationships is what I cherish, and what the community has completely abolished and restricted. As such, I wanted to my cover to be depicting how emotion is infectious, even to oneself, and how people almost always want to share theirs with those around them. Hopefully I'm at least somewhat successful, as I really want you guys to appreciate its aesthetics and its underlying message.
(Note, the thing the red stuff is being poured on is the stump of a hand)
1. Medium.
I chose to hand draw my cover on a blank sheet instead of photo shopping, it due to my lack of knowledge on how to photo shop, and that I felt more creatively fulfilled by sketching it. I also thought that a more organic look to the art piece would help me in sending my underlying message to the viewer.
2. Fonts.
The variety of different fonts are not the result of laziness (I promise), but are a critical component of my idea for the cover. In the book, feelings are described as dangerous, unruly and should be controlled or restricted by any means necessary. This leads to the life governing rules and lifestyle imposed by the Elders that stop the people of the community from accessing basic human emotions, all in the quest to avoid strife, pain and devastation. By expressing the title and name of the author in multiple different fonts, I aimed to emphasize how emotions take different shapes, and in some occasions, can become uncontrolled and leak out of their container. This symbolizes the emotions that Jonas, and regular people like us, feel on a daily basis, and how it leads to us acting respectively of how we're feeling. This contrasts with the life in the community where people have no personality, and consistently follow the rules with no ambition to be unique or to do what they want, and in doing so, are bland, static beings. This idea is displayed by how I wrote "Giver", in the bottom right.
3. Colour.
Similar to the fonts, I used a myriad of different colours to display the varying emotions humans are subject to on a daily basis. Medical conditions aside, I believe that every person consciously, or unconsciously, debates their emotions on a second by second basis. Because of this I used the varying colours to illustrate that sentiment and to address how many emotions we may unknowingly handle throughout our lives. However, some colours that I used do address the textbook meanings. The liquid pouring down from the hand is specifically red. I chose this because I wanted to convey feelings of passion, frustration and anger, emotions that Jonas feels in increasing intensity over the course of the novel. Also, the alternating colours associated with the fonts and finger nails further push the idea of multiple emotions on to the viewer. They grey colour of the stump symbolizes emotional neutrality, which in essence, is the epitome of what the community is about.
The glaring white/blankness of the page is another attempt of mine to express the symbolism of colour and the state of emotions within the novel. I believe that the Elders think emotions are corruption, and that they taint their world. I left the background blank as it represents the world of Elsewhere, which without emotion is blank, but just like the hand and fingernails, it is painted by the colour of emotions, and in time, will become an art piece emotionally respective of the individual who created it.
Symbolism.
The hand drawn in the middle of the cover belongs to Jonas. The reasoning behind drawing it reaching down is found within the novel. As during the story, Jonas aspires to save his fellow community members from the stale, hideous world of the emotionally vacant. During his struggle to do so however, Jonas often feels anguished, furious but determined. These qualities are then depicted in the red liquid, which represents his emotions moving from him and onto the stump. The stump symbolizes the how members of the community are unable to feel emotion, even when Jonas tries to force them too. This occurs when Jonas attempted to and failed pushing a memory into his sister, Lily, like he had to Gabriel. This handicap is literally drawn as a cut off, or lost hand, as the rest of the community is literally unable to grasp the idea of emotion, even if they wanted too.
That's about it for my book cover, hope you guys enjoyed it!
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| My personal book cover |
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