Use one or more of the following book related sayings as a starting point to generate visual ideas and responses:
● Bookworms
● A closed/open book
● The oldest trick in the book
● You can’t judge a book by its cover
● In someone’s good/bad books
● By the book
During this early formative stage, aim to be as wide-ranging and imaginative as possible in your ideas. ALL ideas are valid at this point, so don’t censor; this is not the stage to decide what is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ idea – at this point they are all just ‘ideas’ with equal merit. Let one idea flow fluidly, intuitively and organically into another to make unexpected links and associations. Record your thought processes and ideas using thumbnail sketches, spidergrams and annotations.
Thumbnail sketches are a way of recording ideas through quick pen or pencil line drawings. The quality of the drawing is not important; a drawing of a person does not need to be anatomically accurate, for example. The drawing serves as a visual reminder to you of a fleeting idea. Aim to make thumbnail drawings in the same quick way that you make short written annotations – keeping up with the flow of your ideas. Draw a range of visual and conceptual possibilities using the book sayings as your starting point. Aim to spend 45 minutes working on this, generating as much content, potential ideas, thumbnails, visual metaphors or imagined books as possible. Thumbnails can give an indication of composition and art direction. For example, how does the subject sit in the frame? How is the subject lit? What particular attributes does that subject have? Thumbnail sketches, along with annotations, are a good starting point to begin exploring these aspects.
I've chosen the phrase 'The oldest trick in the book'. Mainly because I wasn't sure how to approach this one visually and I wanted to challenge myself. I think there were ways in my head of how to express this phrase in an obvious way, so I wanted to explore how far can I take it.
I started by mapping and brain storming intuitively a spider-gram.
Then, I started to use mind mapping and thumbnails quick sketches of ideas, from obvious ones to more odd ones - using my spider-gram brain storming insights.
I've made some annotations along the way to remind myself what I meant in each thumbnail.
