Cracking On

I'm lucky in that my Dad is an Architect, and he works from a sweet office in his garden, which is fully decked out with nice printers and computers which I get to use and abuse for my work. So, I spent this weekend at home taking advantage of the facilities, and doing a bit of printing on the A0 plotter. I did my final illustration as well, although this one took a bit longer than the others....
Here's the first couple of versions;


This image is about the 'The Hidden Boundaries' - this means the seafloor and it's sloping margins. This environment is constantly changing, often due to human factors such as drilling for oil and building oil platforms. These, and other factors such as earthquakes etc, cause underwater landslides or open up rifts that another earthquake may close, so the whole seafloor is constantly changing. As the ocean floor is so deep in places it's extremely difficult and expensive to explore, which results in much of the exploration being carried out by people who stand to make a profit from any discoveries that are made - namely, the oil companies. I've tried to represent this through making my photo of some ink look as oily as possible, and putting it in a square. The square, I feel, is the opposite of the natural circle, therefore showing the human element of the equation. The map shows how underwater currents also affect this environment, bringing nutrients from the deep ocean to the surface and enriching the sealife in the upper layers.
However, I just wasn't happy with the image as I don't think it goes with the others, so I made some more changes, below.


I wanted to keep a square element as it represents the human effect on this realm nicely, and I tried playing around with some lines to represent pipes carrying the oil. The main change though is obviously putting the 'oil' in the circle like the other illustrations, and adding the coloured ring. The most effective bit was removing the top of the inner circle to represent the sloping margins being unstable, and the whole underwater landslide thing. This works well in the final image (below), where it is more fractured which hints at it rather than saying it too obviously. Also, as in some of the other illustrations, placing the image off the page slightly shows it's at the edge of the ocean, and our knowledge of the oceans. The white space is also important to represent that there is much we don't know, and have yet to learn. I should point out that the crosses by the words in the illustrations are a subtle map reference, and I think they act like compass bearings, to plot the lack of knowledge for that area on the map so to speak. It makes sense in my head anyway...