#meerasyal

[marksinn]

Book Brief. Literal concepts.

I won’t rehash the earlier post where I broke down my interpretation of the three protagonists of Life Isn’t All Haha Heehee, but there’s a summary scrawled along the top of my sketchbook here. I wanted to just throw ideas down that came to mind when considering the three personalities in the book, and I think I surprised myself when the nine sketches I was left with actually gave me food for thought!

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4:28 in the Studio

Poetry for Meera Syal. @MeeraSyal #Poetry

Maybe she wanted it like this and seriously Expected inspiration to walk in off the street. Everything's in the right place for it: her Rings, her watch, the arch of her eyebrow. All add to the weight of the waiting. Is she: Sat in dusk, or lit by black? Yearning for something or someone? And who's that waving through her eyes, Looking like her next laugh, or cry?

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[littlefoible]

Day 3398 - Meera Syal . . . #playwright #playwrights #playwrightsofinstagram #MeeraSyal #dramatist #British #playwrightADay https://www.instagram.com/p/CYm-ZLvpxbx/?utm_medium=tumblr

[marksinn]

Book Brief. First concept.

From the early stages of my design process I wanted to represent the Punjabi culture of the author. This permeates the story as the three main characters merge the culture of their ancestral heritage. I took  selection of Devanagari symbols from the Tatsam Bengali font and created anglicised text, and then built the five words needed. The colours I chose were initially to distinguish the words from each other, but I played around with them a little, changing them to colours that stood out from my research – mostly from the elegant clothes I’d seen in Indian boutiques near my old flat: deep purples, greens and oranges. After this, I went a little further into this inspiration and looked at fabrics, and choose one with swirled pattern and stars – the made me think of Chila, the hopeful (if simple) character who looked at much of life through a rose-tinted lens.

Not entirely sold on this idea, I was side-tracked into looking at the composition of the words. Probably the biggest challenge, and bug-bear, of this task is having to position five words of slightly different lengths on a relatively small rectangle. The text had to be the focus, so I couldn’t fill space with illustrations, photographs or even negative space – the text was the image, and vice versa. Working in black, so as not to distract myself, I positioned the words in ways I thought would work. A few examples are shown below, but as I started to rotate the text it became clear to me that horizontal was the only option for this concept, and slowly it was becoming clear that the focus was going to be on the first word and the last two – I essentially had to include isn’t all in the same way youngsters are forced into dragging an unknown cousin along to the cinema with their friends

Bringing it all together, I settled on a stepped composition, with Life being a large, bold opening, and isn’t all leading down to the double underline of Haha Heehee. Quite happy with this layout, I put the first colour mix into this, and then thought about backgrounds. I liked the fabric idea I had been playing with, and I had bought five or six squares of fabric to play around with. Up close one of the patterned cloths, while attractive, was a little distracting. So I photographed it from a distance (and before ironing it) and played with the lettering sitting on top of it, or cutting it out. Neither of these gave me the desired effect.  

However, one of the cloths had a dull gold colour to it that I thought would work well with a dark, royal blue fabric. I cut the word Life out of the gold and photographed it under various lamps, trying to get some colour variety through lighting. This always produced a fairly dim version of the colour, but  once I had the blue fabric behind the word, the yellow really started to pop out of the letters. After various photos, various lights, and still playing with composition now that the words were physical, fabric objects I eventually found the photograph I was looking for. The blue background gives off a brilliant, plain-seeming texture, and the lettering looks more real, rather than it just being digital typography (not to slate my preceding and succeeding works).

The reason I’ve pushed forward with this concept is the various ideas of heritage it gives me. The Indian-style type gives off the personality of the book itself, and the hand-made fabric aspect makes me feel like there’s something incredibly grounded about the image. It’s not a reflection of glamorous, professional, yuppy London life that is portrayed in the exploits of Sunita in the book, but it’s that homespun community bond that has tied the girls together as they evolved into independent women who have strong connections to their roots.

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"Life isn't all haha hehe."

- Meera Syal