Inspirations

I have been working on my brief with Age Uk called 'life stories'. I have gathered all the information I need in order to represent a particular story but I do not want to fall down the generic 'storybook' illustration route. We have been asked to do this collaboration for a reason, and I most certainly got the impression that we were expected to put our own spin on things in order to keep it contemporary and interesting.

I have been looking at the work of Lauren Redniss, particularly the illustrations from her Radioactive book. She illustrates "The story of Marie and Pierre Curie because it is a beautiful love story". I find the pages from this book are particularly interesting because of their composition.

I have drawn out all the elements I want to include and have put together a 'chance' book. I photocopied all of my drawings and created smaller and larger versions of them, I then went on to layer them by placing images in the paper tray so that I could not remember what order they were in nor would I know how they would turn out when I copied another image on top. This book is going to help me to create exciting compositions that I would not have instantly thought of.

Once I have established were each element will be placed and how it is going to look, I will begin to apply my techniques to create the final book illustration. I usually work with collage combined with coloured pencils and line drawing. I have turned to the work of Beatrice Alemagna in order to see how to successfully apply these ways of working, as she also uses similar media. I am a great fan of her work and there is no book to better 'show it off', than Un lion a paris.

After a long time of hunting, I managed to finally find this book! The illustrations are beautiful and with it being so big (A3), You can see them so clearly. An extremely good buy!!