OUGD603 - Penguin Student Design Award (Norwegian Wood) - Image Developments

One initial idea was based on a part of the story where each time Naoko requested her roommate Reiko to play 'Norwegian Wood' on guitar she had to place 100 yen into a glass jar. The idea was to place a forest setting within a sealed jar, literally putting the song into the jar itself, as well as signifying Naoko's bottled feelings and feelings of being alone or 'trapped' by her illness. Another variation of this idea was to visualise an open jar, symbolising Naoko's freedom from her illness after her death. It was decided that image wise, this concept was the strongest, therefore imagery began to be developed to work with this concept.

Initially, variations of jar illustrations were digitally drawn exploring what shape would work most interestingly and effectively. These began as very clean line drawings, however it decided to utilise the pop art style based on visual research into art of the 1960's when the book was set. The chosen illustration was then further developed, creating bolder, uneven lines to give it this pop art aesthetic.

After this initial line drawing was developed, colour was then explored in a variety of different ways in an attempt to make the inspiration behind this better communicated and further explore the pop art style. In these developments, for the background, it was decided to use a solid shade of red with a white halftone overlayed onto this, with these colours being used to represent the political aspect of the book in its links to the flag of the rising sun and its link back to the original book cover designs, as well as red being one of the main colours typically used in pop art due to its boldness. Halftone was then also explored overlayed onto the jar illustration in a variety of ways, for instance to give the jar a more 3-dimensional aspect in helping to represent its transparency and material as an object.

Upon choosing the design which I thought worked best, this was positioned again with the jar's lid since it was thought this then clearly communicated what the object is as well as giving the imagery a bit more dimension and another playful element that adds to the concept of Naoko's death representing her freedom from her illness, as well as becoming a direct link to her favourite song and title of the book 'Norwegian Wood'. Within this jar, then, further bits of imagery were played around with initially, placing the main scenery of the story, being a woodland, into the jar itself. These pieces of imagery were kept fairly minimalistic in both detail and colour in order to work effectively with the pop art style I was aiming to communicate.

In addition, variations were also explored whereby a red rising sun was placed into the jar behind the woodland imagery in order to directly represent the political aspect of the book through visualising the flag of the rising sun in a playful way. This was also thought to add a bit of mood to the imagery, setting the scene for the themes and moods present in the story.