Plague Doctor

I did this for my illustration class. Took awhile for me to finish it, but I finally got it done! It was designed to be a 9x24, 5 color screen printed poster, but I've decided to focus on printing another project and hold off printing this for another time.


The project theme was called beautiful/ugly and the class had to illustrate the beauty in something ugly. I chose to illustrate the bubonic plague. The beautiful aspect I found in the plague was the elaborate costuming of the plague doctors and their way of combating the plague through the use of herbs to cover up the deathly smell wafting from the infected. It kind of reminded me of a wizard or alchemist mixing up a powerful elixir using various ingredients, and although utterly futile in curing victims of the plague, I found the use of herbs in order to cure a disease to be a beautiful act due to its mysticism.