After watching the Netflix Original Series 'You' at the beginning of the year, and consequently seeing the promotional imagery, I was inspired to create an illustration based on the themes of the show. The show centres around the character and behaviour of main character 'Joe Goldberg'. The narrative is driven from Joe's perspective, his perception of events, and his distorted view of love. The main chunk of the show focuses on his relationship with a girl he meets at the bookshop he runs, this is what I wanted to use as inspiration for the poster. I decided to only hint at the girls face in the poster because I didn't want to give her an identity, I wanted her to be an idea rather than a person. Whilst she is important to the story, we find out that Joe meeting a girl in the bookshop isn't an off chance, it is a repeated, sinister routine, I wanted to portray this without giving away too much to the story. The composition I decide to go for was based on the desire to have everything centred around Joe, symmetry was also an important aspect of getting the composition just right. There are a lot of straight lines in this illustration, from the vertical lines of the books to the horizontal lines of the shelves that feature prominently throughout, making sure these were all as sharp as possible was of high-priority.  Another way of making sure the focus was on Joe was in the literal use of focus. Depth of field played a major role in this piece and it was something that I had never optimised fully. By blurring the background and foreground of the illustration and splitting everything up into layers like a photograph, the poster has so much more depth and atmosphere whilst also helping to show Joe as the focal point of the poster and story.

 

As well as the black and white original poster, I also created a colour variant; using blue and red to add further connotations to the poster. The colour red can symbolise both love and danger, a combination that is littered throughout the themes of this TV series, and depending on the individual you will see it as either one or the other. I wanted to adapt this thought process into the poster by using a blue and red gradient, purposefully using the red half over Joe, to show that he is the love or the danger, or both. I wanted to however tilt the balance towards danger, by adding faint red drips into the gradient you immediately picture it as blood and the perspective changes; if you first saw it as love, that starts to change and if you first saw it as danger, then it only locks in that thought process. I love both variations of the poster for different reasons, however I think the black and white original showcases the detail in the poster better compared to the colour variant.