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Welcome to rachelsays... The blog of Rachel Lewis, containing my thoughts and musings on illustration, design, fashion, music, cakey-bakey goodness, culture and things that I generally find cool. There's also a good chance my own illustration work will pop up on here.

All work on this blog is copyright to me unless I state that it isn't. Obviously. Don't do stealing, kids.

So come on in, have a look around, and leave a comment if you like what you see.

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Semester 2: Children's Book Project

This was my least favourite module. I don't know what it is about Children's Book illustration with me; I love it when other people do it, when I do it I just...can't. Maybe I'm just weakest at sequential imagery. Maybe it's the way I've been taught to approach it. I don't know. I probably shouldn't give up on it yet though because it's a really worthwhile area to get into. I suppose I just need to find my niche. Anyway,
The Careless Boy:

This was all about featuring disabilities more in illustration. It's from this website, Children In the Picture, created by Scope, that the idea for the module came from. So we all had to choose a story where one of the characters had some kind of disability, and get it nto the book in a way that didn't make it an issue, yet still showed it in a subtle way. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. The character in my story, The Careless Boy, has EBD (Emotional Behavioral Difficulties), and throughout the story he begins to be more considerate and caring due to having a new friend.

I won't put up all 10 pages, here's a few good ones.

Page 1.

Page 3.

Page 7.

Page 9.

There was a front/back cover too but it's basically a coloured version of page 3 without the text.

Oh and yes, the brief was it had to be a rough, black and white version. I wasn't just being lazy.

All images copyright to me.

That's it for Semester 2. Except the mammoth doorstop which was my dissertation research. More on that in probably October time.

Semester 2: Image & Text Project

This project was tough but I loved it. It was based around the Penguin Design Award competition; it wasn't compulsory to enter to pass the module but of course I did. As well as producing the book cover for our chosen book, we had to also illustrate a Single and Double page spread from an extract of our choosing from the book. The book I chose was On The Road. What a classic.

I was quite proud of my entry; I didn't win though. Or get anywhere close. But then looking at the standard of the shortlist and winners on the website, it's easy to see why. I think the drawing in this could be improved. Actually it was a monoprint, but I think I would have done a much more detailed pencil drawing if I was going to do this again. Oh well. This killed me to get it finished in time, but that's always fun :)

This is my Double page spread, from an extract in the book where there's a great description of a jazz bar, all heat and noise. Hence, this illustration.

This was my single page spread. I'm not keen on this one actually. It was rushed to meet deadlines and just not as good as it should have been. It was based on a scene in the book where Dean crashes their borrowed Cadillac into a ditch, a farmer has to pull it out in the rain (which I forgot to add in, haha) while his mysterious daughters look on. Meh. That doesn't really come across.

One more project to go: Next year I'll be able to submit work here much sooner after it's creation, thankfully.

Semester 2: (Negotiated) Recipe Project

I'm very aware that I finished Semester 2 about 3 months ago. However I haven't had access to Photoshop to convert these files into blog-friendly formats, until I finally cracked and downloaded a 30 day trial. Which is a pain to install and uninstall but I won't get access to it until September aka start of third year madness. So there we go.

Student Recipe Book:

I loved doing this project, Negotiated projects are always the best because you can do what you want :) So I decided to design and illustrate the front and back cover, and 2 double page spreads, for a fully illustrated recipe books for students. Illustration and cooking; pretty much my 2 favourite things haha.

The front and back cover with spine.

Double page spread with recipe for a lovely Risotto :)

Same type of spread for a chocolate mousse recipe. Thanks to Gordon Ramsey for that one! Yum yum yum.

If I'd had time I would have loved to do the entire book, with about 20 or so recipes. Maybe one day.

As usual, all images are copyrighted to me and myself only.


Illustration Friday: Detach


I had lots of fun with this one. Collage was definately the best way to go. I took the theme of 'detach' and made this crazy, out-of-touch, manic world. This is what my life feels like sometimes ^.^ Mmmm, multi-coloured buttons and pills.....

Enjoy!