HEADLINE: "MODERN PARENTHOOD HAS BECOME A PERFORMANCE NO FAMILY CAN SUSTAIN" 

As a parent, this headline really spoke to me and the idea of "performance" brought up a lot of possibilities for visual symbols, perhaps even too many... 

Brainstorming:

Idea Generation and Sketching:

Started out with these ideas, but I remembered Tom's advice about "no act outs" - so I really tried to steer away from "normal people" being in an exaggerated situation, and many of my ideas felt a lot like New Yorker cartoon scenarios as opposed to viable conceptual illustrations.  It became easier when I started thinking about it in terms of 'what are symbols for parenting and performance?', rather than just visualizing "parents performing" their daily lives. That got me more towards things like babies, bottles, eggs in nests, chicks, vaudeville, etc -- more interesting and thought provoking. 

As I continued, the puppet concepts seemed too heavy-handed, and I had a tangent where I considered using something like paper cut out dolls / collage, but it felt like layering on too many ideas and became a bit meta and overcomplicated. I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.

Throughout the process, the circus theme kept coming back to me. I ended up settling on trapeze because it communicated a team effort, and also the high stakes of parenting. 

I wasn't sure how to include the baby. Once I decided on capturing the moment of tension right before the "catch", it came together pretty quickly (I guess because I had done all that thinking and iterating beforehand). The clown costumes was a last minute add that I thought adds a bit of a wry edge to the illustration, and the similar look of the two acrobats is intentionally ambiguous and adds a uniformity to the generic parent figures so they don't read as any particular gender, but also could be interpreted as two versions of the same person, even. 

Final Illustration:

*Appendix*

Visual Symbols Exercise 

Idioms Exercise