Stop Taking Our Damn Books

If there's one thing that really fires up my bases, its the topic of banned books. Why would you ban books? Books are wonderful things, things of knowledge and wonder and magic. Growing up, I was in trouble a lot, but the one thing my parents swore never to take from me was my books. Books are just so important, and banning books is one of the stupidest things I can imagine happening. Either way, it happens.
People also seem to not be very aware of banned books. It's not really a topic that enrages people (even though it should) or captures people's attention. So when we were given instruction to design something for any issue we wanted, I knew that banned books was the one.
After having chosen my issue, I had to come up with a way to portray it. I knew I didn't want to do something cliche such as books with chains around them. I started with researching lists of banned books. But the list of banned books is massive. Name a classic, and it's most likely been banned somewhere. So I had to narrow it down. I went with banned books that I had read myself. Well, that narrowed it down some, but it was still a pretty large list. I started brainstorming key symbols and images from each book, and ended up with another list, but of images. After that I worked on incorporating as many as I could into a scene. Eventually I ended up with this:

(version one)

In this first version, I only managed to incorporate three different banned books, only one of which was easily identifiable. The leaves and tree are supposed to represent both Leaves of Grass and Gone with the Wind, while the girl is supposed to Alice, and therefore Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I fixed a couple things, such as the background color and I added a bright red letter "A" to Alice's dress to symbolize A Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the end I had two copies, one kid friendly and another uncensored one. 

(above: Kid friendly. below: uncensored)