Jason Mosley's Portfolio

From The Depths

From the Depths is my interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Letters to a Young Poet deals with Rilke’s philosophy on art, and I gravitated to the ideas of evolution and improvement. I used the sketches of a character I've created to convey the progress and change I have made as an artist myself. With my own art being at the center, I wanted to embrace my favorite mediums, graphite and charcoal, by blowing out the scans of my sketches and enhancing the roughness of the graphic marks.

Process

Since I knew I wanted to use my own old sketches I started by going into my old sketchbooks and pulling out all these drawings. I decided to use my original character as a constant throughout.

Being a booklet I started structuring with just the text before exploring with the images. I played with the body copy and callout quotes as just other assets to create a story through these compositions.

I originally meant to scan my sketches as cleanly as possible but because I would inconsistently have access to one I started taking pictures with my phone, which led to shadows in my original images. When I would edit the images, trying to get as close to an actually scanned image, I would get images blown out which had a fun effect that I loved.

As I started putting together images and text I tried to let the images speak and be the star of the show. And manipulating sketches to create some stunning spreads.