Concept
For my fiction project I wanted to focus primarily on the world in which the story is set, rather than focusing on representing characters on the cover. As Octavia Butler uses minimal world building in her story I wanted to create an environment using the minimal details provided such as the pasture, and the animals which are readily available for the T’gataoi to use to harvest the eggs, and the human and alien integrated community within the pasture. The story is very atmospheric and sensitive and I think the readers interpretation of the characters is important as details are revealed throughout the story, progressing from the cage like legs of the T’gatoi and the tapping on the floor as T’goi moves and the four limbs on each section of the body. These sensory descriptions of the characters I believe is more important than how they physically look, so I didn’t really want to detract from that with a representational illustration, and instead perhaps view the landscape seen from the lense of one of the characters themselves.
I wanted to focus on farming and agriculture for the book cover which represents a lot of the important central themes of the story, such as species co-dependence, the ethics of farming, and domesticating animals to the extent where they would not be able to exist outside of the constructed conditions which the species higher in the social hierarchy needs to enforce in order to manipulate the lower species to meet their own necessary ends.
Inspirational surreal vegetable representation
Aesthetics + Process
I was interested in how I could create a 3D set using shadow, light and colour to portray an organic alien countryside landscape. I chose to use insulation foam in order to create rolling hills and horizons, and using the organic irregularities in the expanding foam to represent how land is raised and changed over time, due to the routine and patterns of livestock. I used spray paint in a similar way where there is limited control and unavoidable mark making and movement of the paint due to the irregular surface of the insulation foam and gravity. I also experimented with wetting the surface between layers, scrubbing off the paint while it was still wet and using acrylic paint, using spotting and brush strokes, to represent natural growing structures of the fields and for surface pattern.
In contrast to other students I viewed the farm as being productive and lively and ultimately successful as the structure seems to be so heavily ingrained into the characters, accepting their conditions as being lower on the power structure in contrast to the hierarchy on Earth where humans are undoubtedly at the top, and the one instance in which a character rebels they ultimately give up as it seems their running around a locked cage, showing how deeply ingrained the conditions are. Or perhaps the environmental conditions just aren’t suitable for humans, which I want to represent in a surreal looking landscape.
I had a few ideas for how I would want to represent the countryside. As the human community is agriculture I was thinking about the societal structure in a more medieval or peasant like environment, which I wanted to represent using a kind of patchwork style field design. The different growing pattern on each hill representing a piece of fabric and the fences between them representing stitching. Perhaps using cord or shoe string laced between the fields. Then using a barn, farmhouse, or perhaps estate style housing dotted across the landscape, showing one of the alien livestock chained to one of the structures. Then experiment with lighting - gels, refraction, smoke (clouds or mist?) and shadow to represent different times of day and the different universe or planet and colour of the sunlight.
Typography, Layout and Composition
As I’ll be using many different bright neon colours in my photograph I would like to use a layout where I am able to choose many complimentary colours for the text. The colours I’ve used reminds me of the comics anthology Spider’s Pee Paw, the Skunk Trunk collective, and Char Esme who makes Queasys, where their mixed media and digitally manipulated images verge on sensory overload.
COVER
