Part 2 Exericse 11: Visual Metaphors
The Visual metaphors I found were used a lot on advertising, politics as well has health related things, I think they are powerful because they are so different and unpredictable in the sense, they make you think about the message that is being portrayed, with the use of usually unrelated things bringing them together to symbolise something and creatively communicate the information. When searching I could not really source the pictures directly to any articles or editorial texts, I mostly found them on a collection someone had created on Pinterest which rarely had links to where the pictures originally came from. However, I found and illustrators website who specialises in visual metaphors called Paul Blow and under some of the illustrations in his portfolio he writes about what the purpose of the picture is and what it was used for. I realised when looking through his illustrations that his picture was used for the example in this exercise.
paulblow.com. (n.d.). Illustrator : Paul Blow. [online] Available at: http://paulblow.com/.
other sources-
Creitive. (2015). Metaphors in advertising. [online] Available at: https://www.creitive.com/global/blog/bring-out-the-power-of-metaphors.
When doing the exercise, I thought looking at the list all the phrases seemed a bit intimidating, only one of them “dreams of romance” I discovered had a lot more ideas I could associate with the phrase through the illustrations. Romance was an easy concept to explore, there are stereotypical and well-known things related to the subject like, Love, Dinner, Chocolates, flowers, gestures ect That I could easily draw. Dreams could also be translated through pictures easily, its well known that dreaming occurs when sleeping and how they usually occur at night so that is what I drew.
When planning out what phrases to choose I used spider diagrams to come up with all the words related to the phrases hoping to generate physical things to draw. “Broken relationship” I thought also had some things that could be drawn physically, again broken relationship being something most people can associate with emotions, arguments, things like divorce and so on I still could not think of many things I could draw because the concept is very emotion orientated rather then something easily turned into a picture. I also had a go at “Reaching Retirement” the reaching part was obvious to draw, and I separated the two words so I could clearly do one or the other. Retirement is such a vague word, I did not know how to capture this other then actually writing ‘work’ to ‘no work’ the only things I could think of was growing old, having more time, and going on holidays. I used my nan and grandad’s life as a guide for this one and it turned out well.
To see if I had successful illustrated these phrases, I asked some of my friends and family what ideas they though of when looking at each of them and they were all fairly on topic. Here are some words they used:
Dreams of romance- Love, dreaming, love story and romantic
Reaching retirement- growing old, living life, travelling however, no one thought of the word retirement.
Broken relationship- bad memories, break up, sad.
I think the most successful out of the three was dreams of romance, it was the easiest to interpret.
Broken relationship
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