Visual Journal - Initial Responses, LINE

Inspired by the research I had done about the line work by the artist Word To Mother, I started responding to my idea of advertising using just ball point lines. Picking certain images from the newspaper, I wanted to try and portray a busy, confusing, dystopia representation of advertising that you may not notice at first.

By using lots of elements, I wanted to recreate the bombardment with which advertising is forced upon us even in our newspapers, including the vocabulary commonly used, especially around christmas time; words such as SALE, NEED, DON'T MISS, all used to dictate what we should spend our money on.

I found it quite interesting how lots of the adverts out at the moment are for furniture and sofas, all very similar and portraying an idealistic ideal of a home and material goods that should be in it. It links to that idea of illusion of choice, when actually there isn't much difference between one sofa or another. I like the way in this drawing the words used to persuade the viewer into buying the product are overlapping the actual product; usually people end up buying things just because they are on sale or they feel they need them, not because they genuinely want or need the actual product, in a way making the deal more important than what is being sold. 

Once you start paying attention to the photos used by advertisers to portray an ideal to a possible consumer, they start to appear quite disturbing and just odd. These images are of people pretending to be happy to give the impression that whatever is being sold will have the same effect on it's consumer, but they're actors and their expressions are fake, its all an act. They are always very over the top and 'perfect', whilst very false and sinister. 

Trying to push this idea of dystopia and sinister, and the bombardment of desires and persuasions.