How To Poster- 'How To Make Toast'

I began my response to this brief with an 'ideas bang' in order to generate a large number of ways to make toast, from straightforward realistic methods, to ridiculous or fantastical ones:

Ideas Bang- A2 sheet

Ideas Bang- A2 sheet

Ideas Bang- A2 sheet

Ideas Bang- A2 sheet

Ideas Bang- A4 sketchbook page

Ideas Bang- A4 sketchbook page

It was really challenging coming up with this many ideas, especially after the first 50 or so, and as a result there were a large number I was not particularly happy with. Fortunately for the poster I only needed 24, so after the ideas bang i reflected on which ideas I liked the best.

Some of the ideas were definitely pretty weak, no matter which way they were looked at but after eliminating those I decided the easiest way to cut down the rest was to try and identify some kind of theme I could use to link the 24 required.

This proved difficult again, there was still a lot of vastly different approaches left to narrow down and, as a result, no clear theme approaching. 

I eventually decided that I liked the idea of using horrible, or ridiculous but physically possible ideas seeing as most of my favourite from the 'ideas bang' were in that vein, e.g:

Stubbing a cigarette out on bread

Channeling the sun's rays through a magnifying glass onto bread

Attaching a pipe bomb to bread

Using car exhaust fumes 

Farting into a lighter over bread

Strapping a firework to bread

Giving bread a carpet burn

Keeping bread in your armpit

Seducing bread

etc.

Once I had made up a list of 24 from ideas following that attitude however, I decided that, despite having a certain coherence, a lot of the ideas were fillers and not particularly strong additions to the poster.

I then decided that that particular theme was not going to work very well so rather than force it, I decided to abandon it and started to think about how I would like the images to be laid out on the page. Of course this seemed a bit backwards but I thought considering lay out before actually having all the images I was going to include locked down might provoke new ideas about the content.      

The first layout sketch (photographed poorly) was simply 24 blobs marked out in a sort of orderly fashion which was not very imaginative or interesting, but, whilst I was sketching it out the idea came to me to perhaps illustrate 24 stages to one of my good ideas.

   

I then considered which of my ideas I liked the most, or would work well in stages and first decided upon the 'use a dragon', thinking I could set up the 24 stages to work as parts of some quest, culminating in taming a dragon and then using it to toast bread.

I changed my mind, however, finally deciding that I would instead use my favourite drawing, stubbing a cigarette out on bread, as the starting point. I felt it would be funnier and also allowed me to pursue my original preference for slightly more grim methods of making toast. I decided I would have 24 vignettes depicting a hand stubbing a cigarette out onto the same piece of bread until it was completely blackened, maybe stomping the cigarette end out on the bread in the 23rd and 24th image. I then did a very rough sketch of how that may be laid out and began to complete numerous drawings of hands holding or stubbing out cigarettes in different ways, in different mediums to help further refine the aesthetic of the poster.

  

I'm pretty happy with how the final poster turned out and although some of the ink splatters and smudges were accidental I think they add character and fit nicely with the overall mood. My only concern with the poster is that there's probably a slight chance it isn't obvious there's a cigarette in all the drawings.