Making the book, playing with photo editing

Spent this past week gathering all of my pictures and narrowing them down to the ones I like most, or best capture the mood I'm going for in relation to the text I have. The text is about eighty percent ready to go, I just need to go through one last edit and then pair them with the most appropriate photos within the book, as well as choose some highlights to put up on the show wall in vinyl type to give people a preview of what they'll find in the book. I've begun to format the book with photos and text with a few different layouts that repeat in order to keep it a little more interesting than a photo and text on facing pages throughout the whole design. It still needs tweaking, but I think its a decent start at least in order to visualize the rest of it. So far it looks like 40 pages should be a good length with the current layout, but it could also be adapted should I stumble upon a different design solution that works better with a different page count.

I also gave more thought on how I want to incorporate screen printing into the show, as I know it isn't necessary to show everything you do at the show, but as someone who predominately uses silkscreen as a medium, I would really like to showcase some of my abilities, and I think I have found a way to incorporate it that utilizes my skills combined with the photos I'm currently working with. I was playing around with the levels and contrast in photoshop and found that some of the photos I had looked really striking when reduced down to pure black and white imagery. After placing them over a colored background out of curiosity, I realized this was a great way to incorporate silkscreen. I wouldn't do many, probably just two or three for the show wall, though I'd consider possibly printing an edition to sell depending on how well they turn out. I'm set to begin printing them by the end of this week provided school doesn't get canceled with the impending snow.

With these I also began to toy with the idea of further distressing them to match some of the photos I have from earlier this semester where things are grainy and out of focus, or play with depth of field to create somewhat vague imagery, as well as combining them with the "alien" elements of "alienation", to give a nod to the work of last semester and my other classes. So I ended up making these to look sort of like those old photos of supposed UFO's from the 50's and 60's. I had a lot of fun with them and think these might be more what I'd like to screen print for the show, but I'm not sure if the distressing is the best effect or if I should just keep them clean like the imagery up above.