Drawing/Imaging: Final Project

The excerpt of 2 A.M. at the Cats Pajamas that we read was packed full of delusional fabulousness and signs of decay. I wanted to make a wallpaper and portrait that showed Madeleine’s unique character—a sassy jazz singer in the body of a little girl who is left in the wreckage of her mother’s death.

The pink flamingos mentioned in the story immediately jumped out at me because they spoke to Madeleine’s playfulness and flamboyance. When I read that the jazz club the story is centered around was a Cuban jazz club, I began researching Cuban interior design. I saw a lot of ornate wallpaper and old chipped plaster walls that created a beautiful texture. I decided to use this for my design because the old plaster represents decay, a tinge of sadness to reflect the story’s circumstances. The old-fashioned style also mirrors Madeleine’s character, as she acts like an older woman of a different era. To get the texture of the plaster in Illustrator, I appropriated actual plaster by importing a photo of it, lowering the opacity, and placing it over my blue background. I chose blue and white because they are the colors of snow and winter, where the story takes place, and snow “flurries” are frequently mentioned in the excerpt we read. The yellow background on the wallpaper pattern is modeled after the color of a cigarette, which Madeleine huffs on in the excerpt.

For the portrait, I decided to go with a film noir style. I wanted to portray Madeleine not as a little girl but as what she aspires to be: a jazz singer. After looking through a lot of old jazz portraits, I was struck by the way harsh light and shadows make smoke look white and delicate, and distort and enhance certain features of the face. I decided to make the smoke turn into musical notes to reinforce the jazz theme. Like with my wallpaper design, I drew this on Adobe Illustrator.

Source images and inspiration: