For a hand lettering assignment it was suggested we could design a book cover for a book that did not exist. I became drawn to one titled The Orange Dress because I had been itching to go back to embroidery and try my hand at lettering through thread. My initial ideas to play around with an embroidered fruit for the O and later, to use what look like orange segments to form letters, were almost immediately rejected once I read the synopsis of this fictional book ( I had been thinking the book would be about garden parties and whatnot, I couldn't be more mistaken). The synopsis read as follows:
"The Orange Dress is a novel about the doomed poet, Cecil Tyrell, and concerns itself with the last five years of the poet's life. Bitter and half-crazed with alcohol and drugs, the poet writes a furious and strangely beautiful last book, "a farewell to art", which he entitles The Orange Dress".
As a result, I went back to the drawing board and envisioned a horrified and tired face with a gaping mouth, both encompassing, and being consumed by, an orange dress.
