5: Experiment #3 - Shopping expanded

I tried to take the drawings I'd done in House of Fraser in Cheltenham onto another level with this experiment. I tried to mock-up some of the ideas I'd had about the experience in a few different ways.

1: Distorted/ surreal sense of space

I tried to circumvent conventional layout with these images - introducing a slightly German expressionist/Dada sense of objects in space almost collaged on top of each other, and playing around with scale - perhaps George Grosz/ Max Beckmann/ Kurt Schwitters ?

 

This was to try and portray the shopping experience as disorientating and bewildering. The off-white paper and charcoal also - unintentionally - channels the 1920s.

2: Human comedy - vanity/hideousness

This drawing was more about caricature of shoppers - both the women and the clothes look haggard and awful. The man in the background is sizing up the shop mannequin. With the wash this looks more like something by Ronald Searle or even Roland Bachelor - 'the human comedy':

3: Age and lust, real and imagined bodies

The final drawing is more blackly comic still. I wanted to say something about how the store relies - and preys - on female shoppers using an idealised vision of the female form. There is a lustful 'sugar daddy' buying clothes with his wife/mistress, and a mother/daughter pair gazing adoringly - and enviously - at the shop mannequin. Only a teenaged girl can generally aspire to that sort of figure, and presumably the dress it's wearing.

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I bodged the clothes and store items a bit in these drawings - my visual memory of these things is not great. Perhaps with more visual reference - maybe photo reference or actually using collaged elements in the drawings, the 'props' might be a bit more convincing. Colour would help to this end. The faces generally do the job I think. There is certainly scope for more experimentation with distorting visual space and scale with the department store interiors concept.

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I had some other, more conventional narrative ideas about ways to depict the mad, manic, shopping experience which I experimented with in thumbnail:

A view from inside the store - the rabid crowds are outside and the security are straining trying to keep the doors shut. In the next frame (undrawn) the rabble bursts into the store sending goods and security everywhere in the manic rush for goods!

Below: A sketch for a cartoon about shopping and mental disintegration.

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