Books with a different context..

After reading The Scarlet Letter and watching Juno the theme that stuck out to me the most was the theme of private vs. public self. I wanted to illustrate this theme in a way where it applied not only to both stories, but also applied to society today. I decided to make a book using poster board and construction paper. I chose to make the border of the book red because it stands out just as the characters did. In both The Scarlet Letter and Juno both of the main characters stood out from the crowd in a significant way, which drew a lot of attention. On the outside of the book I used magazine cutouts to illustrate misconceptions of the 2 characters. I used a lot of judgmental words and words that essentially would make you want to look at the book but not actually open it. Then, when you open the book you see the quote "Never judge a book by it's ..." and several magazine covers. 

In The Scarlet Letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the main character, Hester Prynne, was highly criticized by the people who lived in her town. Their judgment was based solely on the “A” that she sported on her chest. Not many took the time to actually get to know Hester, which ended up to taking a toll on her. For a while she lived a lonely life because not many people wanted to get involved with her and what they believed she stood before. This relates to the book because everyone was so focused on her outer appearance that no one wanted to take the time to see what was inside.

Juno also shares a similar storyline. One thing that’s different in this story is that the main character, Juno, had a hard external appearance. She acted as if she didn’t want anyone to know the real her which is why no one actually did. Throughout most of the movie, the one person that wanted to know the real Juno, she drove off until the end. This also relates to the book because I chose to make parts of the book to look forbidden so that people don’t actually open it.

Although I am very proud of how my final product came out, there were a few things that stood in the way of me having a complete project. One problem I encountered while doing this project was determining the size of the actual book. At first I wanted to create a book that was essentially the size of a poster board, but that proved to be unrealistic. If I were to do a book this size, I would have needed a greater amount of magazine cutouts than I had. I chose these cutouts very selectively, so if I were to add more just to fill space I feel that the meaning would no longer be clear. However, I do feel that the quality of the project is being jeopardized because of the size but this was the best way to accurately get my point across. Other than that I really had no other complications. Normally my final product comes out nowhere near the way I envisioned it because of time. However, I did a good job with time management for this project so my final product was not far off from how I saw it to be.

            Even with my project fitting my expectations, if I could do it over I would do some things differently. For instance, instead of using magazine cutouts I would have found another method. I say this because for the most part all the magazines I got cutouts from had common themes. This made it hard for me to add a sense of diversity to my project or a variety of images. Maybe I could have done a drawing or something, which would have required me to generate my own themes, images, and ideas.