Major 1 - Brothers Grimm

The brief set, was to choose a story by the Brother's Grimm and illustrate and to convey the story in some way. The story I chose was Sleeping Beauty. I chose this story because there were several parts of it that I felt could be visually appealing, for example, when thorns grow around the castle. Also the Brother's Grimm story had been changed in the Disney version which I had been more familiar with, and therefore I wanted to highlight the differences made. The Brothers Grimm stories are also known for being slightly more sinister than your average fairytale, and I felt my style of illustration would suit this. 


Here are some images of the illustrations I created:

This is an illustration of the talking fish, who tells the queen she will have a daughter - this 

is not in the Disney version.

And finally some images of the finished book:

All of the illustrations and front cover were created using Lino's. I experimented with scanning in the illustrations created by the Lino's and then printing them off as part of a computer created book but felt the illustrations lacked a quality which made them appealing in the first place. Therefore, so that the book was entirely created by hand, I experimented with screenprinting the text of the story. However, the prints rarely came out clear and distracted from the Lino's, which are teh main features. Therefore I had to combine making the book by hand and on computer and I'm extremely pleased with the results. 

Minor 2 - Penguin Design Awards

This project was a competition set by Penguin. There were two categories, the Adult Book Prize and the Children's Book Prize, which required you to redesign books covers set  for each category. For the brief, we were required to create book designs for both the categories.
The adult book was 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this is the cover I created: 

I came to the conclusion of how this cover would look quite quickly. From my research, I was inspired by spanish artwork, and so I looked for typefaces that would reflect this style on the cover. Once I had found a hand drawn typeface, I created a Lino which is the front cover. I did go on to experiment with stencils, but returned to the original Lino. The back cover took slightly longer to resolve, at first I made lots of little Lino's to place around the text, and then went on to create one large Lino.
This was personally my favourite piece of work that I created this year during my last year of university. 


The book for the Childrens Book Prize was 'James and the Giant Peach,' by Roald Dahl. This is the final cover:

When I re-read this book for the project, the idea of creating something visual to represent the part of the story where James crawls through the peach until he comes across the insects, appealed most to me. I had to experiment quite a lot with the visual style before coming to a conclusion, as I was trying to discover one that would suit the image of James in a tunnel, though in the end, the final cover doesn't include James.

Minor 1 - Book Jackets

The brief set, was to choose a contemporary author and three of their books, then, to redesign the covers and create a container for them. I chose the author Tana French, the titles were; 'In the Woods,' 'The Likeness,' and 'Faithful Place.' 
These are the covers I created:

In the Woods

The Likeness

Faithful Place

All three books are crime/thrillers which all previously had manipulated photography as the covers, with a title and the authors name also. I have always had a tendency though, to use more hands on methods when creating imagery, and after experimenting with chalk and stencils, I used ink to create the covers. As the images by themselves are so bold, I decided not to put the title or authors name on the cover.

As the covers are so simple and use no colour, I took the same approach with the container. However, instead of using ink, stencils that had been used during the development process, were used instead.

This is the container: