Final Prints - Macbeth

This was the first final design I finished and was happy with, and it has sort of set the tone for the rest of the print set. Since drastically changing direction with these designs (and nearly inducing a heart attack over Christmas while doing it), I wanted to use this as an opportunity to throw away anything that came into my brain too easily. I looked at illustrators with darker, more abstract visual signatures, such as Mike Mignola and Chris Bachalo for inspiration in getting further away from myself and trying to become fully involved in the process of joining idea generation directly with image generation without my brain faffing about in between.


This process has been refreshing for me as its allowed me to shut myself up and really start making work I'm beginning to feel a lot more connected to.
Most of my prints have a sense of visual duality to illustrate an aspect of the story of the play I've chosen, here I doubled Lady Macbeth's looming shadow with a dagger. Focusing on her character rather than the titular character was a product of stepping back and approaching this brief from a new angle, as she really is the catalyst for everything that happens. Macbeth is malleable and easily swayed, Lady Macbeth is very much the one in control, and truly responsible for all the death in the play. I wanted to get across her dominance and dangerous nature both at once, and I think that reducing this image to block shape works better for that rather than trying to convey a muddled and overly complex visual metaphor.