Rebecca East UWE Illustration

 For my final piece I wanted to continue with the same kind of narratives I'd been exploring throughout the project, that being short-form conceptual horror stories.  While I was thinking of ideas for a new short I thought back to the 10 panel narrative workshop we'd done at the start of the project and the little story I came up with for that. I'd liked the concept of the comic but really wasn't pleased with my execution, so I decided I wanted to reproduce it in a more fully-realized piece.  I stuck with the same conventions I'd chosen throughout the project; monochromatic, body-horror centric, dialogue-less and focused almost solely around the concept. This time however I wanted to put more of a focus onto aspects of presentation like structure and detail.  I also wanted to apply some of the book binding techniques I'd learned throughout the project, so I bound the short into a small pamphlet and then initially to make a cover out of card, however I found this...

 - 10 Panel Narrative Workshop -  Junji Ito and Visual Narratives Research -  Narrative Development: 'Strands' - Narrative and structure research: Junji Ito's Uzumaki - Bookbinding workshop -  Research: analysing narrative in film -  Narrative Development: 'Squirm' concertina

 'Squirm' is another short I created inspired by an old sketchbook drawing. With this short I didn't just want to create a comic I also wanted to play around with some concertina binding techniques.  This is another very simple short, this time about a boy who eats a worm and then turns into a pile of worms. I'm finding that I really enjoy these kinds of narrative pieces; very simple horror stories where the focus is less on any real plot or characters and more just on strange concepts and interesting ideas. I've found narrative work difficult in the past because I find myself getting caught up on certain aspects that are necessary to a more traditional story structure, that just don't interest me. But with this more bare-bones approach I'm finding it a lot more engaging as I'm able to explore my ideas without feeling tied down to a more long-form structure.  I developed this mock-up into a full concertina, however due to time constraints I was unfortuna...

 During the bookbinding workshop I made my sketchbook for the rest of the project. I made a a5 case-bound book that I covered in latex. I used liquid latex, painted onto a sheet of parchment paper and then peeled off to work as a sheet to cover the book with, as you would use any normal piece of fabric. It was a little challenging to use as it's a somewhat unpredictable material; after peeling off the parchment paper backing and covering the latex in talc to stop it sticking to itself, there was a lot of shrinkage, which made it challenging to cover the entire book, as the sheet I had measured and painted out was considerably smaller than I had planned for. With a little stretching this wasn't too much of an issue.  I chose to work with liquid latex as I'd had quite a bit of experience with it in the past and I knew it could have a skin-like appearance, and for the body horror theme of my project, I thought it would be quite fitting. Another aspect of liquid latex that I en...