I have been away from this blog for quite a long time now, being busy with the completion of all the illustrations required for the book.

It’s a school assignment but I am very proud of myself for completing it all and am also very pleased by the results. We will be editing the book and its layout next year, but we already setup the size and the specifics. This one is going to be 21×21 cm, 16 pages plus cover and it features a traditional italian fairytale about an ogre with miraculous feathers. The hero is sent by the king to get a feather that would make him heal from a deadly desease. On the way to the ogre’s cave he meets and rescues various characters. At the end the ogre gets stuck in a boat hence he’s defeated.

These are not all the illustrations I made because some make no sense without the text. Many have a rectangular size because cover two pages (so 21×42). I hat to take pictures because the images were too big to scan for my little A4, sorry for the poor image quality.

Please leave your comments, I’d really love to read your feedback and advices.

It’s been a while since I posted some of what is keeping me busy.

I have done this yesterday for a competition at school. The competition was about merging the concepts “Christmas” and “furs”, and it’s been organized with an animal protection agency, obviously against real furs.

The illo has been done in collage (first time for me…) and gouache details.

Still working on the illustrated book, another little preview of a detail.

I kept all the progresses for myself because I wanted to see if I could deliver, nobody but 3 good friends of mine knew about it, and I was afraid of anybody else comments, either good or bad.

I have never been a fan of children illustration, I always thought the vast majority of it was naive an not original, with little room for challenge and thought provoking images, but I had to change my mind when I searched for some inspiration and when I checked the work of the 50 selected illustrator of the previous edition of this competition.

No theme was assigned so I thought about children playing and so I came up with this idea for Playing Cards Playing (the actual title of the pieces).

You can check the competition details at http://ilustrarte.net/index.htm

I am not 100% satisfied with the results but the first challenge was to give myself the chance to participate and see if, with a little discipline, I could send the illustrations in time. I did it! And I am super happy about it.

If I didn’t spend a fortune so send them, I would have bought myself a gift.

I’d like to hear your comments!