Summative Statement

I began my practical project by drawing directly from celebrity tabloid magazines. I was doing this through fascination with the content, as it seemed so loud and garish and completely inappropriate in every way and it seemed amazing to me that they were just allowed to exist with no questions asked. They seemed sinister and manipulative in some way, as if to lead the audience quite ham-fistedly to certain points of view. At first for my essay I wanted to explore this, the manipulative visual and linguistic devices these magazines used to achieve and keep their readership,  but research revealed they were struggling to as a result of the internet. I wondered how this kind of news still exists in a physical form when all the content was available for free online, which became the new focus for my essay, how lifestyle magazines, as a broader category, remain in print and compete with digital news. I looked into drawing the aesthetic of other lifestyle magazines but decided to focus on just the trashy ones because they made a stronger image. My aims with the drawings were to demonstrate the unethical and unfair nature of the journalism in celebrity tabloids, by recreating their aesthetic to a hellish degree and focusing on statements made and images printed in the magazines that are lost to the din of yellow journalism. By rearranging the information into categories and making the trashy, throw-away aesthetic I have tried to highlight the evils I see in the magazines with a hope to communicate them to their readers and ignorers, and raise quesitons about whether this invasive nature of reporting is an acceptable and humane process to subject people to.

Boards

Final images

Rita Ora

Rita Ora was the other single focus portrait I chose because the gossip magazines seem so intent to hound her reputation since she has rocketed to new heights of fame and she seems consistently non-plussed.

Jordan

This image was focused on Katie Price, after I decided to make the remaining drawings focus on just one portrait to get them finished on time and to have a change of pace form the larger more complex drawings that were becoming repetitive. I think Jordan epitomises this celebrity tabloid culture as she perpetuates her fame through nothing other than being famous, and telling the magazines what she's doing at any given moment.

Where is the Love?

This image was for news about celebrity relationship issues and break-ups, demonstrations of the news prying into the sad and sensitive aspects of celebrities personal lives.

Kardashian Khaos

This was a study into the celebtiry obsession these magazines induce and perpetuate, demonstrated through the disturbing amount of personal information published daily about the Kardashians.

Stop Abusing Your Bodies Process

This shows the development of the first of my drawings, through explanation and progress photographs

Initial magazine drawings

These are the initial drawings I did, described in more detail.
The Chantelle drawing was previously dissected on a board earlier

Essay sources

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/04/26/guest-post-the-evolution-of-cosmopolitan-magazine/

http://www.britannica.com/topic/Cosmopolitan-magazine

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/books/a31650/helen-gurley-brown-quotes/

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/about/about-us_how-cosmo-changed-the-world

http://wayan.com/files/Leader_Analysis_Helen_Gurley_Brown.pdf


https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism