Narrative Image Making...finished

Today has been a long day, first day off from college in 2 years because i'm ill... and i do not like it! So here i am with a cough, a sore head and everything else doing something constructive when i should be resting not a good lazy person!

 We've just finished most of our units we're doing just no and if you read my post before I finished Papermaking quite a while back but here's the illustration I done for Narrative Image Making which is based on the short story by Angus MacLellan in Stories from South Uist. I have to admit finding a direction to go in, in this unit was quite difficult as i liked doing most of them and really couldn't make up my mind which to go towards for the final illustration. Where photo-montage, Quentin Blake and 18th/19th century illustration styles where drawing me in. I wanted to stay true to the traditional side of the story as its a "ghost story", told by spoken word in Scottish Gaelic as a sort of folk story or superstition of the island, have to say i'm not the best figurative painter but it doesn't help when I've not been doing much of that the past 2 years in college so hasn't improved very much, but i'm quite pleased in how the final piece has pulled together. Here it is....

FRONT COVER

BACK COVER

SPINE

DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD

 Reasons for the mermaid's design: I wanted to keep the mermaid to more of a scary fish with a hint of woman rather than the other way round, and keep the face a mystery so it became abit of the unknown to the reader and you only got the profile and the back of the mermaid i wanted to her to look as if she was stalking the boat like a predator and its prey so i kept the mermaid looking in the direction of the boat under the sea giving her a darker tint to her 'skin' to look as though she was under the water

Reasons for the boats design: Since this story was spoken between 1869 and 1966 the theory was that the boat would look like a fishing boat from that time, basic and battered as you don't see a traditional ghost story with modern hi-tech gadgets.

Reasons for the rough sea and dark clouds: I wanted the later part of the story to start brewing in the image as it says that a storm will settle when a mermaid has been seen, so tried to get that starting from behind the mermaids figure as you can see the roughest part is more to the right of the mermaid's figure.

Reasons for Donald character: Once i got shown the story, i instantly saw Donald as a old grumpy man with a huge beard and the yellow overalls and wellingtons, maybe that's just the stereotype I've grown up to i don't know, at first he was too animated, so i had to make him more realistic as he didn't blend well with the rest of my illustrations

I wanted to make the pages and the book cover and spine look old, tattered and generally quite traditional and done this by applying tea bags to the paper and paper mache-ing the cover then painting it brown hues

Also i thought keeping the writing quite simple and handwritten will give a hint of it being a traditional told story and like someone was recalling a moment of the mermaid keeping up the tale of the creatures of the seas, also i kept it in Scottish Gaelic to keep in tune with its heritage and it's place in the world. The Gaelic may be completely wrong because i used the internet to translate the text.

Thanks for reading my ramble

Annie :)