Illustration in Response to the Written Word Children's Picture Book

Project 3

Weeks 5, 6 and 7

Decision Making

In the new brief we have been given four choices and within each choice there are more to be made so right when I saw the brief I sat down, read it all through and made notes to decide which project I want to do. (option 4 isn't in my notes but it was illustration based on lyrics and it just really didn't appeal to me) So once I made some notes I followed all the links through and decided on the ones that spoke to me and I've settled on option 3 which is "early readers children's book" and of the two options given I have picked Rudyard Kipling's "How the Elephant got its Trunk". I'm super excited for this project, I've got three weeks to produce 1 double page spread, 1 single page illustration and a front cover design. I want to be really ambitious with this project and try to really out-do myself. 

In my notes I basically just decide what I want to do and some really basic first ideas on how I could execute this so that I know where to direct my research and what kind of things I might need to acquire to make this happen. I'm going to look into effective children's books and particularly at Martin Salisbury's book on the subject as well as find out what kind of colours and compositions are often used in this kind of illustration. I'm thinking using fabric and embroidery as my medium but I need to get some research about that in before I make my decision - I have plenty of experience with embroidery but not in this kind of context but I have some ideas on how I could make it work. Another thing to consider with doing embroidery that I hadn't thought of in my notes is the time scale, once I've decided what I'm doing I'll have to draw up a schedule for myself to keep to.

Research and Inspiration

So the very first thing I did was look up Martin Salisbury as the brief suggested in this section and saw his books on creating children's illustrations... then I saw how expensive they are. Lucky for me some people on eBay didn't know how much they could've sold their copies for and I snatched up "Illustrating Children's Books: Creating Pictures for Publication" which was published in 2004 and "Children's Picture books: The Art of Visual Storytelling", published in 2017. There is a second edition for that book but I couldn't find one second hand and I'm sure the first edition will be great anyway. While they make their way through the post I had a look at some other helpful stuff;

I'm trying to get a feel for what kind of themes are consistent throughout children's book illustrations and this article (click the picture to visit the site) was a nice simple overview to get started, there's loads of beautiful illustrations on there. I'm already noticing a somewhat common style that seems to be in fashion at the moment and I'm not sure if that's exactly what I'm wanting to go for.

I'm enjoying the spreads where the text isn't overlaid on the image but they interact on the page together around each other on a blank background. I do think something could be done with the background though but I'm definitely enjoying this kind of approach to combine the elements. 

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Peter Beatty

Sienna Riglietti

Martina Terzi

E H Shepard

Jon Klassen

Chaos Ego

Oliver Jeffers

I've got a massive soft spot for Oliver Jeffers' work, particularly "Lost and Found" so I had a good look at a load of his work and put together some of my favourites below. There's something about his work that I find so magical and I would love to be able to give that kind of feeling with my work.

This embroidery piece is actually one of my own art works, I know it's strange to be taking inspiration from myself but of all the embroidery pieces I've done this is closest to the kind of thing I'm picturing for this project. When I did this one I had wished I had stitched it on a coloured fabric so that's something I want to take into account with this piece. I'm also thinking about whether I should stitch it up exactly as it'll appear in the book or if to do it in smaller components and edit it together but I suppose I should worry about an actual design before I worry about that. 

These embroidered pieces that incorporate felt are exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking will work well for this project. It gives some really cool textures that I think will look fun in this context and a plus is that it'll take up less time than an entirely embroidered art work.  

Thumbnails and Ideas

I wrote out the entire story because I thought it would really wedge it into my head, it worked but I definitely didn't need to do that. I picked out some lines that I had a really strong mental image with and this is where my first thumbnails will stem from for the double page and the single page. I also doodled down what I was imagining this little elephant looked like and I'm in love with him. He's not a final design obviously but for the first time in my life I got the exact image from my imagination onto paper so that's nice, he won't stay this way though because I need the style to match the medium better. 

Above is my thumbnailing and working-things-out process. Kind of messy particularly in the beginning because I was going back and forth between different things a lot but I got there eventually.

Sausage Tree

Giraffe Thorn

Sycamore Fig

Real Fan Palm

Sweet Thorn

Lowveld Mangosteen

Wool Grass

Mowana Baobab

Blady Grass

Medlar Tree

I decided to pick Botswana as my setting just so I could research more specifics to the area. It's not an information book but I'd still like the elements to be accurate and Botswana has the biggest elephant population in Africa. I found 10 plants that are native to Botswana because I want to use plants as decoration. While looking for them the colour orange really stands out and that's great because I want to include orange in my colour scheme. 

Feeling very inspired by these Dulux paint colour swatches, mainly the middle two and top two on each square. I want to use colours that are visually appealing but also obviously relate to the setting which is Africa so these are the sort of tones I'm liking for that. 

Martin Salisbury

I got my hands on two Martin Salisbury books that were going for cheap on eBay, I got "Illustrating Children's Books: Creating Pictures for Publication" and "Children's Picturebooks: The art of visual story telling". They're both full of great stuff so I've just put below some of the pages that were most useful to me for this project. 

Process

These are my four pages, the cover first then the single page and the last two are the double page. These are my final designs that I will use as a "map" for my embroidery. The colours in the drawings aren't spot on by any means but they give the right indication to me while I'm working. They're the exact size that the embroideries will be which is 20x15 cm and again this is so I can follow them as I work. 

These are the colours of thread I'm going with, it was actually quite a process to decide on colours for each element and then pick shades that are all different from each other but all work well together. I've picked really warm, rich colours for a few reasons; they're really inviting, they go really well with the African setting and they're all very strong colours that will stand out on the water-coloured fabric. 

​I made this project bigger than it needed to be but it certainly paid off. It took me a good while to get the embroidery done but it was worth it. I left wrinkles in the fabric when I scanned them in because I like the way it looks, I feel like it keeps the handmade, authentic feel and to me it feels friendly? Not sure how to describe what I'm meaning but I like it anyway so that's why its like that. 

Outcomes

So here are the finished pages! I'm SUPER happy with what I have made. I used an embroidery font I downloaded for a few reasons, I knew if I had hand embroidered the text it would have never come out clean, neat and easy to read and with this being a children's book, it needs to be easy to read. I think the font has a good mix of obviously looking like stitching but being super clean and legible.  

I made some mock-ups of the book to see how it could look in person. This is my first time making mock-ups because I didn't know how to do it and I thought it was super hard to do. I was wrong. They were so easy to create with these ready made photoshop documents, I do want to learn to make my own template from scratch though because with this one, I couldn't find a template that was the exact size of my pages - luckily I knew this might happen so I left space around the edges of my pieces that was fine to lose. I love these mocks so much and I'm super excited to start mocking all my work up! :) 

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