The intention of the portfolio cover was to use a stencil of your initial(s) and the elements of design to create something that represented you in some way. I drew inspiration from the geometric logos of my late 80s childhood and decided to employ the element of colour as a rainbow. My initial plan had been to use the familiar ROY G. BIV colour spectrum, but altered my plan to avoid the seven-fold symmetry I would have had to create. Instead, I focused on only the primary and secondary colours, giving me a total of six sides for my shape.
I used the As as wedges of a hexagonal form, and originally all wedges were touching. I found however that I could create implied lines and a central focal point by moving the wedges further from one another. I ran into the issue that my design had a 1:1 aspect on a rectangular surface, and I decided to create lines leading from the hexagon into the negative space that I had not used.
Using my background in photography I made contact sheets of 35mm film strips I had shot. I used different strips for each wedge and tried to align the mood of the colour to the theme of the film. The film strips were arranged to create a lateral motion that drew from the positive to negative space, thereby uniting the composition.
I had planned to use food colouring to dye each wedge after I had processed the photographic paper, however I found this was not possible as I had used resin coated paper for the prints. Instead of subtle stains I had to instead colour over the prints physically with markers. This largely obscured the content of the film, but peers commented that this really hid the introspective component of the piece, which further piqued their interest and curiosity. In retrospect I might have used much more expensive fiber paper for the prints should I have had an issue with the result.
