ILLU5050 book illustration.

Literal illustration in response to the written word.

For this project I have been asked to produce three illustrations in response the short story, A warning to the curious, By M.R James. I have to create a fabric cover design for a big book of all his stories, A chapter header in black and white and a full page illustration including as much colour as id like.

The story, A warning to the curious.

I started this project by reading the story I had been given and taking note of whatever stood out from it to me. I liked the strong image from the demon and his footprints but it was later pointed out to me that I shouldn't show what the monster looks like as its much more tense and scary to a reader to not know.

Laurie lipton

The first horror artist I came across that I liked was Laurie Lipton, her work is very intricate and carefully drawn with pencil.

Although her work feels much more fine art, and I would rather use colour in my work, there is something that draws me to this style of image. She likes to subtly hint to themes or something being off in her work.
If I was to take anything from looking through her works it would to be that although my illustration is to be literal, it doesn't have to just be a straight up illustration of the baddie say. It can still be more thought provoking, like you have to actually look to find why the drawing so so creepy.

Ghost story book covers.

Suffolk beach

I really wanted to look at the location of my book, or at least the scene at the end that I want to focus on.
The dead tree shown below comes up quite often also when googling images of the suffolk coast.

Book cover.

Being honest I didn't do as many sketches for this part of the project as I did with the others.

I took the sketch I was happiest with and took a photo on my ipad. I liked the look of

Full page illustration.

My first initial idea for the full page illustration would have been to have the shadow demon hidden behind a tree or something of the sorts while Paxton retrieved the crown. I then moved on to possibly having it follow them after they retrieved the crown.
I wasn't terribly happy with this as an idea as it wasn't a strong enough image. I decided to look back at the story and read through it again then I realised one of the best scenes would b near the end, it had all of the main characters together on the beach.

I fell on this idea in the end. The moment right before Paxton is killed by the demon. I made sure to keep the horizon on the diagonal and tried to fill the page up nicely keeping all the things I had learnt so far in mind composition wise.

I decided to draw this up bigger as a proposal for my group tutorial at the start of week 2. I mocked some of the colours and textures up with oil pastels also.
unfortunately this idea was shot down as I was taking away the sense of danger and mystery by drawing what I thought the demon would look like, rookie mistake.

To fix this problem I decided to flip the perspective over so that you could see over the two men running down the beach's shoulder rather than the demon.
Leaving the threat as a large looming shadow proved to me what my tutor said, it was definitely much more threatening and effective alongside a written story.
I have noted for future, its much better to leave these things to the imagination of the reader.