For Design we made a book jacket for our story as if it was going to be turned into a novel, and then we created surrealist pieces.

The title of my book is Apartment of Music because of the narrative I wrote involved an apartment that had a cello player in it. The design concept behind this piece was to use the outline of a cello to foreshadow the events and then to put the title into the the sheet music coming from the cello. I definitely didn’t have a very good idea of how I was going to do this piece. Even the color scheme didn’t come out the way I wanted it to. The software I used was Illustrator and InDesign. Looking back on it now, I wish I could redesign it because I have a better idea of what I wanted my book cover to say about my book.

The transformation that takes place is flies and moths that come out from behind the plague doctor mask, go to the tip of the nose, take flight, and slowly morph into birds. For the whole picture, the ground is dry and rotting, with a HDR shot of a plague doctor mask a little bit buried into it. Behind is an HDR shot of a gray, stormy sky. There are maggots behind one eyehole of the mask, a symbol of the birth of the bugs. For this composition, I used Illustrator for the silhouette of the birds, and Photoshop for everything else. I used photo filters and played around with saturation, contrast, and opacity levels in order to give depth to the photo.

For this piece I wanted to convey a message about death. It’s scary and gross, but in the end it’s peaceful and beautiful. The person’s soul is free to go where it wants. I used a triad color scheme for this work, as there are three main colors in this piece; gray, brown, and blue. I chose this color scheme because I wanted it to be dark, but the hue of the blue really helped bring the mask to life, a kind of irony that I liked. I chose the plague doctor mask since it’s a symbol for death.