OUIL504- William Burroughs (Set Brief + Initial Ideas)

After being set the task, and been told the reason for us researching our authors, I feel much more satisfied and comfortable about the direction and purpose of the work and feel it is flowing much more fluidly now that I have dimensions and an actual brief to work towards.

I decided to work with some of my original ideas and base my ideas for the editorial illustrations around some of my favourite ones, and using others as inspiration to come up with fresh ideas.

I struggle with editorial illustration briefs set in this way as I find it hard to work towards an image without there being a set piece of text to base it around. The idea of simply basing my work on the life of W.B is quite ambiguous and intimidating in that there is so much I have to work with, narrowing it down to 3 eventual ideas may be somewhat of a struggle.

As I stated before, the most interesting aspect of the research was the anecdotal side of his life, his experiences and stories, rather than characters from his books (seeing as they are mostly semi-autobiographical) or any specific quotes. The most interesting parts of his life for me were his excessive drug use, as frankly most of his life rotated around drug use; his books, his travels, his aims and his experiences. Also his fascination with cats was another interest of mine, the contrast between his seemingly hectic lifestyle and the calmness of his love for cats was something that I found I could work with.

He also talks about a 'dark side'and 'parasitic'aspect of his personality, which is something I definitely wanted to explore through my work, having the idea of a literal dark side and contrast to an image could be quite interesting.

Here are some examples of my initial roughs for the editorial illustrations.