House of Illustration/War Horse

This is a competition entry (not due yet) but below is my draft for the book cover of War Horse by Michael Murpurgo (http://michaelmorpurgo.com/books/war-horse) which is a lovely book.  It reminds me very much of Black Beauty, which I love.

I completed much research along the way including visiting stables, researching other equestrian artists, researching the war, uniform, reading the book, looking at rocking horses etc.

I compared other versions of the book that had been done previously and they were all an illustration of a horse, which obviously relates but they were all very ‘samey’.  I wanted to do something different so I decided to look at rocking horses.  I wanted to convey the safety and comfort of a childhood toy with the destruction and violence of the war and I also felt that the title ‘War Horse’ might put some children (as it was aimed at age 9 and upwards) off reading it as very often they don’t relate to the war as they are too young and know very little about it.  I therefore felt that a rocking horse would be more appealing and enticing to a child of this age as they can relate more to a toy.

Anyway here are my trials and final images.

Back cover

Mock up

Front cover

Illustration for the book

Spine

Editorial Brief

Based on a text from The New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/) called Morality 2.0.

This was basically a text conveying the fact that humanity needs to become more ‘moral’ and have greater concern for issues such as global warming, war, destruction of the ozone layer etc.

One of the issues it raised was that maybe pills such as Citalopram (which are known to have the effect of affecting moral judgement might help to accomplish this.

My first submission was very cluttered and I wasn’t happy with it at all.  My idea was of the Pope dispensing pills to all the world leaders as they are the ones that control the economy.  I feel that in this image I tried to combine too many of my previous images and it just didn’t work so my final submission was a scaled down version of just the morality pills which I am much happier with.

Here are my final submissions as well as some other ideas I was toying with along the way.

 

 

SEDUCTIVE SELLING

This project was to be completed in 3D.  We were told to produce a 3D response as an advert for a company of our choosing.  I chose Interflora purely because I like nature and flowers.

My research was to find out the history of the Company, how they started etc and then do some research by asking people why they give flowers and listing every reason.

I investigated other paper artists such as Sam Pierpoint (www.sampierpoint.com) and Yulia Brodskaya (http://www.artyulia.com/index.php/Illustration) and tested making flowers, pop-ups etc.

My final 3D composition was meant to be a fun cartoon like composition which illustrated the history of Interflora, the diversity of the flowers, why we give flowers and how happy they make us, not just in receiving them but giving them too.

This composition was then photographed (which was difficult considering I couldn’t get a studio induction until after my submission date) to make the final advertisement.

 

 

SUBJECT IN CONTEXT BRIEF

This brief was about getting used to doing several briefs at once.  This was scary in itself as I am not good at multitasking!  I like to get one thing completely finished and then move on the the next so this was hard for me to get my head around, although I do appreciate that in the ‘real’ world this is what would need to be done.

I did find that as the module progressed I did come to terms with working on more than one project.  In fact it proves quite useful sometimes as you could move to an alternative project for a while if you got sick of the sight of one of them, which happens quite a lot, so it did have it’s benefits.

I have just handed all three projects in for assessment so fingers crossed! A question asked of me was “Are you happy with what you handed in?”and to be honest it was probably a ‘no’ as I always think I could have done better – more time and all that………….. but I don’t think anyone should ever be completely happy, there is always room for improvement and I will never be happy.  Lots of lessons learned along the way, so things can only get better.

I will be posting details of what they were in further posts shortly.