Rakes Progress continued

The final two pieces of my Rakes progress. These two are probably two of the stronger ones, one is the 5th piece in the sequence showing a thug waiting next to a car as a get away driver ready to speed off when the other two return, which they do not. In fact his fate can be seen, with the outline of the old man in the top corner getting ready to pull the trigger. The final image, the 6th in the series is rather more chaotic than any of the others, full of marks and splats of paint and ink, to show the violence that has occurred. I particularly like the burn marks through the paper.

Rakes Progress

NOTE: View this series from the bottom image upwards.

Here are numerous pieces im working on at the moment, that tell the story of a group of youths in hoodies trying to break in to an old weak mans house, to take advantage of his vulnerable state, but it turns out hes actually a lot less vulnerable than he looks when he turns a shotgun on them. The pieces mainly concentrate on symbolism, there are numerous references to the Korean war to determine the fact this old man is actually a war veteran. As well as this, numerous images of wilted flowers and skulls etc can also be found in a few of the works. I could go into massive detail on each piece, but i think it may just be better to let them speak for themselves. There are two others that i am currently finishing off that i will post within the next couple of days.

The Terrible Old Man

We have this uni project at the moment based on the idea of "The Rakes Progress", and this is one of the first final(ish) images i have come up with. We have to do a series of six illustrations based on a story of our own choosing. I have chosen an already existing story called "The Terrible Old Man" by Howard Phillips Lovecroft. The story revolves around an old man who lives alone with lots of money. He is very vulnerable, and 3 men decide to rob him. However, they later learn they have underestimated the old sailor, and he kills all three of them brutally.

This first image introduces the old man. He has a globe and a compass to help build connotations of him being a sailor. Waves are also crashing behind him, along with a ship in the background to try and portray this idea easily. The numerous bottles in front of him are due to a detail in the story where the old man talks to these bottles, which all have little lead pendulums inside.

At the top of the image is a caption reading "Fluctuat Nec Mergitur" which is Latin, and translates as "It is tossed by the waves but does not sink". It serves as a foreboding warning about the old man, who is sea hardened, and much more dangerous than he seems at first glance.

Etchings

These are the two etchings i produced for my last Reprographics project. They are both based on the idea of aging, and the positives and negatives of the process.

The first image worked out much better than the second. The first one has less fine lines which were eaten away less in the acid bath so the final print turned out much better and tidier. I was quite suprised how well the dark areas did come out as i was told that i had such a large block of dark area, that it might just turn out grey, but it actually turned out very dark. I think this image is quite successful.

The second image on the other hand did not come out as well. It had much finer lines in the facial features due to it being smaller and more detailed, and when left in the acid bath, the lines all merged together and resulted in much less detail than was previously etched in. While it was not as successful as the first, i still feel it looks okay and was worthy of uploading.