COMPETITION - Church Picture-book

BRIEF

I spotted a competition brief to illustrate a picture book for Boston Parish Church. The brief asks for a single page illustration for the first verse of the story and then the chosen artists will be commissioned to illustrated the rest of the story.

There are no particular constraints other than the text that must be present on each page; media, scale and colour palette are unspecified so I am going to work within my common practice of cut-paper and digital layering that I have been practising recently to achieve a bright and playful illustration.

CONSIDERATIONS

As this is a children's book for a church, I feel it would be easy for this to be very traditional and I imagine many entrants will be linked to the church and know more about the story 'Bo the Boston Church Mouse' than I do, but I am just keen to complete a narrative brief.

Central to the brief is the character of 'Bo the Boston Church Mouse' and so I feel my biggest priority is to create a simple, yet immediate character that will be central to the aesthetic of the book and a visual device across the narrative. I don't want to over complicate the mouse as this is the one element that will remain the same across the stages of the narrative and so needs to work as an icon on each page. 

Scale is a consideration as naturally a mouse would be very small against other components of the image but it seems appropriate to apply an immediate and understandable visual language by scaling the mouse up so that environmental details are not lost.

    

I have constructed my illustration from cut-paper shapes, detailed with gestural pencil marks, over-layed on Photoshop. I feel that the bold colour palette I have employed is appropriate to a child audience as it is engaging and carries the playful tone of voice I am concerned with. 

FINAL ILLUSTRATION ENTRY