Aesthetics for "The Interview"

Hello and welcome back. 

Because of various degrees of procrastination I thought I would write a little bit of an unusual post. Well, unusual for me. Or shall we say, a new kind of post.

Ever since I started writing, I loved to create mood boards, vision boards, aesthetics or whatever you would like to call them. I never share them with anyone, I never use them for anything other than my own inspiration and thought process.

Today, however, I decided to show them to you, one because I am planning on writing an installment of "A guide you don't have to follow" on vision boards, two because I edited and reuploaded this particular story to Wattpad and I thought maybe I can get at least one more reader out of this blogpost. #selfpromo

By no means am I saying that these are great quality pictures, I truly don't think they can compete with some of the amazing work out there but they don't have to for my purposes. 

So without further explaining, let's look at some of the aesthetics that I created for my romance novel "The Interview" over on Wattpad. 

1. Character Aesthetics

These two are specifically created for my two main characters, Alexandra Schneider and George Oscar. They try to capture a little bit of the essence of the two characters and give a feel to what you might expect when reading about them in the novel. 

Alexandra Schneider

Alexandra is assistant to the editor of a newspaper but dreams to become a writer herself. She is originally from Germany and moved to England after a traumatic experience in her past. Even though she's been in London for a while, she has no established friend group and not a lot of contact to her family, which I tried to represent with the black and white filter. She is a loner and has to fight depression, addiction and self image issues. I tried to walk the line between showing how damaging this can be to a person and not over-glamourising these serious issues with "pretty pictures". I think I managed that quite well with this selection. 
The quote is taken directly from my novel and is a direct response to the one used in George's aesthetic. It gives a hint at what kind of story, a romance that deals with the question of desire and want as much as the issues this want can cause. It is not a happy sappy quote, but a tensed, conflicted one (at least to me, who knows the story, it appears like that) 

George Oscar

George is a rich actor, with lots of talents and passions, but he is also someone who is deeply humbled by his success and uses his platform for charity and good causes. He is your typical rich guy in the sense that he enjoys luxury in form of his car and his insanely nice place (little research tip, go check out (luxury) realtor websites if you want to find some great settings for your story, the visual aid can really change your descriptions) but George is also a family man who'd love to one day have children, he adores his big Greek family and volunteers at refugee camps. He struggles with his own mental health issues, which I tried to show by the blue filter/hue of the photo.
The quote in the biggest picture is directly taken from my story and it is one of my favourite lines (and scenes) of his. It creates a tension within the picture without spoiling too much of the story (at least I hope not) and also breaks up the otherwise very cluttered picture. 

2. General aesthetic

I wasn't sure if I should share this one because not much thought went into it, but then again, this post is all about what I use as inspiration. So here we go: 

The Interview aesthetic

I tried to keep the colours a little brighter (because my novel is not all drama and tears) which ended up making the aesthetic look more mismatched. You can obviously add filters and stuff to make everything match, but sometimes that is a little harder to do in a quick Canva session. Again we have elements that both characters also have in their aesthetics. London, some hint at fame, writing, depression/sadness and a hint at romance. This time I didn't use any faces because it seems important for the general one to keep the characters open to interpretation. For the character ones it wouldn't make that much of a difference if I kept their faces hidden. 
I also tried to keep the amount of individual pictures relatively low because otherwise it might get too overwhelming. For the full selection I use my Pinterest boards which have hundreds of photos separated into individual parts of the story. 

I hope this made you interested in my upcoming post about mood boards and aesthetics and maybe it made you want to read The Interview :) 
If it caught your interest, here is the link: https://www.wattpad.com/story/96605926-the-interview-english-completed

I don't typically share these aesthetics on Instagram or Twitter because I'm never too sure about copyrights and stuff, but if you would like to see more of them then let me know somehow and I might share versions with royalty free images. 

Anyway, that was a very long way of showing you three pictures. If you read until now, thank you, I really appreciate it. I've really been trying to blog more (mostly by prewriting posts) and I hope you noticed my efforts. 

Take care and write on, 

Lena

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