As a quick turnover competition brief, I entered the 2016 V&A student Illustration awards. You can enter pretty much whatever you want, and I felt like attempting some book illustration - so I chose to do some work based on scenes from a book called 'A Dirty Job' by one of my favourite writers, Christopher Moore.
'A Dirty job' is about a man called Charlie, who - through no fault of his own, discovers that he has become a Grim reaper. The contrast between the normal, mundanity of his life and the crazy supernatural invasions to his privacy that are caused by this make for some really good imagery, so I thought they'd be good to illustrate.
The front cover is a illustration of this (mundanity vs crazy supernatural) - the spot illustration is directly drawn for a chapter in the book where charlie is given a cigarette case from an old man called James O'Malley, who has been killed by a vampire, called Jodie (a main character in another of Moore's books). The feathers are raven feathers, which are another symbol that repeatedly appear in the book - all of these are things that first make him discover that he is a reaper.
Initial Scans:
These are a mix of pencil, watercolour and white acrylic paint. I was inspired a lot by Brett Helquist's Illustration work and I wanted to see if I could incorporate more analogous media to reflect this:
I was really eager to see if I could push my analogous skills for this - and i'm really proud of how these turned out as images. I think in the past i've swayed from submitting purely analogous imagery because i've felt that my technical skills aren't strong enough - but I do think that they're stronger than I perhaps realised, I just have to hone them a little bit more.
Finalised Digital files (Plus no-text submission)
I got rid of the type on the front cover because I felt it wasn't working - and left it blank for type to be added digitally. I cleaned up the scans in photoshop, using the clone stamp tool (as per usual)
I definitely think that technically these are really strong for me, and whilst their suitability for book design and publishing is questionable I think as images this technique is starting to become a lot stronger. I want to see if I can hone this mix of media more to make more improvements.
Submission Screenshot
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