Penguin Brief: A Clockwork Orange: First Ideas

FIRST IDEAS 

I had never before read or seen A Clockwork Orange but for this project I had to look into some of the defining moments of the book. I made a small list of things I thought about when I read the sparknotes and started forming an idea in my head. For this book cover I actually went with an alteration on my first idea. 

CRANE

My first idea was a crane, or a toy crane at least. What I got the sense of from the book was this feeling of ultimate control from the government and the deliquents having little or no power of what happens to them. For some reason it made me think of toy cranes you get in arcades, when you have the power of the crane and you get to choose which object/you want (government choosing what to do with your life/ who to punish). There was something dangerous and scary about a crane that I liked so I started looking into the claw bits of them and drawing them (with a little bit of pencil etching either side, just casually thinking about colours to match).

CLAW AND HEAD 

Claw's alone weren't impactful so I played around with the concept of heads in the machine and gory injuries caused by being selected by the claw (meant to be representing the damage physically/mentally done when doing prison time). I received some feedback from other people on this idea, most of them really liked it but agreed that it was just too much for a book cover and it wouldn't be selected. The general feedback was that I should still allude to the idea that the government can control lives. 

FREEHAND DRAWING 

I liked the idea of doing some none stop pencil work just to play around with something other than cranes, I tried to show two sides to a person when drawing the people. I also started thinking about hands as the book itself is quite violent, hands are used as weapons but also can be used for positive things (such as making the music that Alex loves so much in the book). 

From this the idea came to make hands instead of cranes, with oranges instead of heads.
I hated that I chose something so cliche to replace heads but I liked how peeling an orange can also look a little sinister. I wanted something that could be a good cover, eyecatching and seemingly innocent but once you had read the book would allude to something completely different.