Image Brief

For my Image Brief I’ve chosen to work on the homeless people around the area I live, ss16 and ss15. I’ve actually met a foreigner from Pakistan who had a cancer on his hand, and it was at a horrible stage, he said that he had no money and no job, and that he had to find the money to cure his cancer all by himself. That's a sketch of how his cancer look like.

Then I’ve been inspired by another man whom live just in front of my flat, under a bridge, where he slept on a mattress. He usually wears only a short and he is very skinny, he never ask for money, instead he always sit somewhere under the bridge and watch the passerby. He is also rarely seen there under the bridge. Its only on my 3rd week in Malaysia that I saw him sitting there. So I assumed he is always looking for food during the day.

My first idea was on that man from Pakistan whom I met. A story that shows a man leaving his family to gain more money, got a cancer, lose his job, and end up as a beggar.

I did several other sketches which could be a useful to represent the story in a more abstract form.

My second story was the story of that man under the bridge, where I would introduce myself as the protagonist and I would see him trying hard to live but end up dead at the end.

After a tutorial with the lecturer however, I’ve been suggested to work on showing traces of the man instead of showing the man. So, I came with the idea of showing the contrast between the other people around ss15 and this homeless man without showing the man. So my idea was several scenes where there will be silhouettes of people around ss15 and 16 in contrast with the sceneries of the traces of the homeless man. To make the traces more visible I thought of making it completely white in a drawing that is well colored. The white color will also represent the lack of happiness in the homeless man’s life.

At the end, I end up adding a dark reddish hue as an identity to the homeless man, to represent a harsh and dirty lifestyle. So, every sceneries with the homeless man would have a reddish hue, and the more obvious his presence is in the sceneries, the more red the scene would get. However to make it more obvious, at the end I’ve decided to add the homeless man sleeping on the road. I though of the scene of the place where he use to sleep as a previous image but at the end showing him sleeping on a random road, which a negative black space in the form of a house to show that anywhere on the road is his home, not only that place under the bridge. It also relates to the fact that I rarely see him there under the bridge.

For the binding of the book I thought of a simple rough rope, a sort of diy type of binding to represent how he does everything in his life all by himself.

And I’ve decided to call the story ‘The Unseen’ since he doesn’t attract too much attention on him, he never ask for money even though his condition he always remain silent under his bridge. I’ve also used the color that I’ve attributed to him, the dark red and the white color as an eye.

This is my sketchbook