A04: Visual Metaphor Poster
For this assignment, we were to pick an opera and create a visual metaphor poster, showing two things at once. We had to make a conceptual connection between different ideas that end up representing the plot of the opera. I chose "L'Orfeo," by Claudio Monteverdi.
In my finished poster I depicted a lyre in the shape of a heart and they are both broken. This represents the effort that the main character put in to rescue his wife from the underworld. He played the lyre to serenade the guard in order to let him through to where his wife is, but the effort failed and her heart is broken, as the rescue was unsuccessful.
48 Sketches:
For my sketches, I played around with the concepts of the main character, Orfeo's, late wife represented in constellations. He followed her "likeness in the stars" to get to where she is being held. I also used imagery that implies his wife was stabbed in the back, as well as imagery that says, after being unsuccessful during the rescue, his heart in no longer penetrable by "Cupid's arrow." Finally, I showed his wife among symbols for death, like a reaper's scythe.
3 Roughs:
For my first rough draft, I used images of a dove, a symbol for love that represents the wife, guiding a blindfolded man. The background color is orangey to show that he is trying to leave the underworld with his wife, the blindfolded man is Orfeo, and he cannot look at her or she won't make it out of the Underworld.
My second rough shows a woman trapped in a cage. This cage represents the confines of the Underworld, and her body is disassembled to show she is already dead and brokenhearted. She is represented by a common symbol that represents women.
My third rough draft shows a lyre in the shape of a heart, and the strings are broken to represent a broken heart. This is the draft that I used going forward. After this, I decided that there are better ways to represent a lyre. I wanted the image to look less cartoony in the final draft.
First Finishes:
I decided that the strings of the lyre being broken was not enough to show a broken heart, so I broke the entire lyre and separated it into two halves of a broken heart. I used cut black paper to depict the broken lyre and scanned it into Illustrator, as well as added a painted background to the poster. The background is red at the bottom and blue at the top to show the ascension from the Underworld back to Earth.
After this, I played with fonts and arrangement of text. I made the title smaller and contained all the text to the bottom of the poster. I did the title by hand to achieve a specific look, and I chose a condensed font for the information about the opera.
Final:
This is my final poster. The important information is slightly larger and brighter so the viewer can easily read it. The strings of the lyre run off the page so that the eye follows the motion upward.
