Surrealism

Definition

noun

1. 1.

   a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, (1923), Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst accessed 28/04/2014

 There are many forms of surrealism like personification or anthropomorphism, but mainly surrealism contains magic realism. I decided surrealism would suit my nursery rhyme as it would make illustrating it more fun and allow me to make the illustrations more interesting and different from how its been illustrated in the past. My first experiment was based on the first surrealist like Max Ernst who's work was very magical and unique. My only problem with making the story to surreal like this image is that you wont be able to see clearly what nursery rhyme it is and without words to explain this defiantly wont work.

 So after that I decided to play living corpse to create a surreal character I could use in my nursery rhyme. This would allow to not only have a unique odd character but mean I would have to completely think about how this character would communicate through gestures and expressions. 

Original living corpse

My version

I made my version of the character cuter and more stylised, I wanted the character to be simple but show personality through how it dresses and stands. Much like in Jason's comic this character has a simple face but due to the fact my character will mainly be rowing the boat throughout the panels I decided to use other parts of the face other than just the eyes to show expression such as the bow and the characters whiskers. 

I feel that this character would work better in a rhyme where the character didn't need to be contained to a boat as I could utilise gesture and body language better. Making the rhyme surreal seams too be a good idea but to make it more magical realism and dream like rather than making it to odd and weird, I still need to be able to communicate it without words and making it to surreal just makes it to unclear. 

Once I realised this I created a short wordless 3 panel sequence showing a level of surrealism that works due to how subtle it is, in these panels iv made her hair and the sea linked as one entity as the patterns I used worked for both. The is more obvious in the last panel but this still relates the the line 'Life is but a dream'.

This works much better and dose not detracting from the rhyme like before but still enhances like in Hilda and the midnight giant, subtle but noticeable.