Squares Squared--

--also known as "The Anti-Social Network" and "I Lied to Stephen King", both assignments done for my great AD Ryan Huddle in different issues of the Boston Globe!

"The Anti-Social Network", about an avowed introvert struggling with the constant barrage of people and accessibility in internet social media.

"I Lied To Stephen King", a humorous essay about a struggling writer lying to Stephen King on the phone and feeling so bad about it that he made the lie a truth and changed his writing career for the better.

(Any day I get to include some film noir melodrama in an image is a good day)

I don't get many square assignments, and they present a unique compositional challenge...to offset the staticness of a square canvas, one trick is to use a lot of diagonals to lead the eye around the page and create a more dynamic space. Squares also lend themselves more easily to centralized images (which I took advantage of in the Stephen King piece)

Introvert sketches & color studies:

As you can see, I had a tough time figuring out what sort of coloring choices I wanted to make! Sometimes you just have to keep starting over again and get all the crummy stuff out of your system. It wasn't until the last image that I realized what was really missing was a lightsource to tie everything together and create a basis for complementary colors.

Stephen King sketches & color studies:

I had a poll on twitter for which color study I should use.... I was leaning towards A, but C is more classically Film Noir and I liked some of the blue tones in B. In the end the majority voted for A, but with some verrrrry close results for B & C! Ultimately I felt justified using the reddish light from A-- it's a little more menacing and relates to this gut-wrenching lie the author is telling Mr. King, and it fits with the overdramatic mood I was going with for the humorous aspect of the article.

All in all, some fun assignments! Plus, I was able to use some of the compositional experience I gleaned from the Introvert image to make the Stephen King piece work better overall. Woo, learning!