In our brief we were asked to create black and white vignettes to accompany two chapters from the book 'The Silver Donkey'.
I firstly did a few rough sketches for the chapter 'The Soldier in the Trees'. I focused on the doll element of the text -
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do a rag doll for this vignette but because I had a 'barbie' doll to hand I drew that first.
After doing more research I found out that the book was based in World War 1 and knew that a 'barbie' doll wouldn't be appropriate so I found an image of Raggedy Anne I could base my drawing on.
I then started my rough sketches for 'The Fog When'.
I was torn between doing a pig or mushrooms for this vignette so I drew both before deciding -
I decided I preferred the mushrooms and that they would work better with the rag doll image (I wanted them to have the same theme/style because chapter headings need to go together).
I then photographed my sketches and used illustrator to do them digitally.
I then composed my pieces on screen - I used the leaves I drew at the beginning on both vignettes. I positioned the leaves in the background then placed the rag doll and mushrooms on top. At first I kept them completely black and white but after getting feedback I decided to add grey tones to them so that they looked less 'flat'.
I then decided to put them into practice so that I could see if they would work with the text and space I had available.
I am quite happy with how they turned out in the end.
