We were tasked to create a poster for an opera or theater play. We could choose anything, so long as we created a visual metaphor and included elements like the date, title and location.

First, I created a mindmap of themes for the Broadway play, "Heathers". I then sketched several thumbnails, thinking about how to create visual metaphors for each of the different themes

One of the songs in the theater play is called "Candy Store" and uses a candy store as a metaphor for delinquent activities. I took inspiration from the song and drew a few thumbnails based off of that song, which led to me choosing the candy store metaphor as my main visual for the poster. Other sketched ideas include: suicide (noose imagery), iconic clothing such plaid skirts (plaid pattern as a jail cell), Heather's croquet mallet morbidly smashing things, and Heather Chandler's scrunchie as a noose.

When I took it to Photoshop, I wanted to make the candy look like enticing jewels with drugs, alcohol, etc. inside. However, the visual metaphor wasn't clear enough because it was hard to see what was inside. Instead, I pivoted to Dumdum wrappers, and made the wrappers better represent the metaphors. I used different colors to represent each of the different characters and replaced the words on the wrapper with stereotypes the main characters were called throughout the play. I settled on this visual metaphor for my final iteration.