There will come soft rain
An assignment was given to us to illustrate the short story, "There will come soft rain", by Ray Bradbury. The illustrations were to be limited to only 8 panels, and the art style was to depict one or more of the Gestalt theories.
Upon reading the story different kind of images played throughout my mind, starting off with the warm feelings associated with breakfast and the start of the day. Though it seemed very cheery, from the very beginning the sense of dread seemed to be lingering in the back of my mind. This sense only heightened at the realization that not a single person has showed up in the story. Yet the house seems to not care, it goes about its daily duties as programmed. The story continues on, we become aware of the residents whereabouts and supposedly the rest of humanities. The fate of the house seems to meet a similar end in which it is demolished by a house fire.
For this assignment, the visuals that I used were the ones that stood out to me the most, the panels have been compiled in a way that to make the transition to the next image more smoother. So that the story can be understood to an extent, while looking through the panels. More importantly I decided to focus on the initial emotions I felt while reading the story for the first time, it started off with the warm, peaceful feeling, but the sense of doom and anxiety constantly present the entire time I was reading it. Certain scenes seemed to make those “negative” emotions more obvious. For the warm emotions I chose three shades of orange, and for the negative emotions I chose the colours on the opposite spectrum, blue with green undertones, to create a more prominent contrast of the emotions. So the colours in each panel represents the emotions I experienced throughout.
Law of Closure is a gestalt law that states that a prominent outline isn’t needed to understand what the image is trying to portray. For my artwork I used basic shapes and mostly a set of three colours to represent this Law. This concept could also be considered for the arrangement of the panels themselves, not everything from the story needs to be drawn out, only some of the key visuals that aid in understanding the gist of the story have been used. This still allows the viewer to understand what message is being portrayed.
So for example, in each individual panel, flat colours have been used to depict the emotions but also to show some level of depth. Though there are no outlines and some elements seem to blend into each other, the different shapes have been positioned and angled in a way that it encourages the viewer to create the distinction between the different elements within each panel.
