Sketchbook development and crit

Todays' design development 

I was suggested to alter my illustrative poster slightly, by adding more grain to the white and blacks. I like the effect that this gives as prior to this development it looked almost too clean cut, and the grain combats this with more texture. I think that overall I will use this poster for my index concept, and could paste it up tomorrow? I think the grain just makes everything look more consistent and it would be interesting to produce some rips when I paste it up to add some texture. 

I was then pushed towards simplifying my abstract icon shapes further, by cropping the image to provide more negative space. My feedback was that the shape/gradient worked really well, but I could manipulate the hair shapes to represent different popular moustache styles around the globe. This design features moustaches from India, Nepal, Britain and France. I really like the subtle reference to moustache styles in this. Additionally, alongside me printing some stickers, it would be quite fun to add stickers on this poster in particular to convey a sense of a poster series within my design, as they could all have recurring shapes and images subtly added in (as well as it making my posters interactive). 

The main thing that I've found is that my poster concepts so far lack a lot of photography, and are more collage or illustration based. Due to this I developed the concept of my symbol poster to feature a bar of soap covered in moustache shaped hair; this would relate to the concept of low caste people having the role of cleaners, and their inability to grow moustaches in the Indian caste system. These are some photoshop mock up posters to just test with how I could produce the poster, but I think I am going to take images of the soap in real life. The only doubt I have about that however, is the risk that the hair strands won't strongly communicate the idea of moustaches. However, I could use that to my advantage in the sense that symbols are learnt and not fully obvious.

Crit responses

Overall, my crit feedback was very positive, and was just a case of narrowing down and refining my ideas. Every comment I got actually focused on colour, and liked the idea of me printing on coloured paper stock - particularly orange? Additionally, I was suggested to add colour in certain sections of my designs, so I might do so in order to experiment more. As well as this, I was also suggested to incorporate the idea of razors by ripping up parts of my poster when it's physically pasted up, which I will definitely try.