New Project - Stupidly Long Post about how I couldn't make up my mind what to do

In our main module are new project is to illustrate a quote and I've chosen:

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known" - Chuck Palahniuk

Had a crazy day of ideas and research where I really struggled to find where I wanted to go with this in the time we have, its hard to adjust to a week and a half project after however many weeks our last was.

I wanted to represent the idea that we are all made of the same/similar/overlapping building blocks which can make a variety of people. Looking at books, music, film, people, country. All the things which can affect who we are.

One of my first ideas was to look at lego, ad how these simple building blocks can create so many things, I found inspiration like this:



and the work of Christoph Niemann who uses lego to illustrate parts of New York life:

http://www.christophniemann.com/

But I couldn't find anywhere that sold just a basic box of lego, the good old days are gone, and wouldn't have enough time to order from the internet. So scrapped that idea.

Then I was thinking of figure designs and the idea of personalizing blank figures with either stickers or aspects you could stick on, similar to this piece by Frank Kozik:

I was then inspired by a piece by Neil Parkinson:

Weirdly this piece gave me the idea to have a very simple figure which a hollow inside and a perpex sheet at the front and you can fill it will small items indicating your personality from a selection of pieces, obviously some people would have similar things which is how it relates to the quote. But then a lot of what I wanted people to put inside seemed very 2D like miniture CD's and national flags etc. so I skipped that idea.

Sticking along those lines I thought of doing a figure that you could fill with stickers of things personal to you a similar style to these pieces by Tom Pearson and Miika Kumpulainen:

But I wasn't sure I was interested in the designing the stickers so kept this idea in case I couldn't make up my mind.

Another idea was to have colours attributed to music, books etc and have people make their own colour by combining the colours of all the things they liked, but I had NO IDEA how to make that work, some superior knowledge of computers than I have. But this was inspired by an artists from my last project Tattfoo who attributed colour squares to fruit/veg to encourage people to eat a range of colours of fruit/veg each day.

Finally I liked the idea of taking a set of simples images (at the time I was thinking basic shapes) and making a story out of these shapes so that the whole thing was made of these same building blocks so none of it was made differently/originally but in each case they make something new. This changed to me using letters from the quote (at the moment thinking of only using the letters from 'nothing' so I don't have too much to work with) inspired by this small book I was shown last week from Brighten the Corners which uses letters to make images:

I also decided not to do a story as you would pay more attention to the story than the quote so thought I would do a cityscape, showing a place with people who are all 'not original'. Here's an initial experiment doing this, unfinished:

This post was ridiculous, sorry...