Book Art

Chang'e Lantern book

2/2/2021 - Book art brief - (Day1 planning)After going through the brief memo, I went through our garage in search of some card board supplies thin and thick ones, as I search through the pile of boxes I started thinking of the questions from the brief. What makes a book a book? What is a book? Is it cover? Pages? Content? What is a book shaped like? Those stuff. I used to read a lot of books back then mostly fictional ones but not so much now since we’re all engrossed in technology with our phones, iPad,tablet, etc. I still read but not so much on an actual book just on my phone or iPad.But when I think of a book the first thing that comes to mind is a the cover, is it eye catching? Are there textures to it? Is the art design to my liking?Second the short summary at the back of the book, does it make me wanna bring it home and read it?And last but not least, the contents inside of the book. Is it intriguing? Are there pictures? moveable objects?is it interactive? or just more words which I wouldn’t mind because as they said the mind is the strongest imagination tool.
I found an interesting card board material that’s folded into a triangular shape and I suddenly remembered a conversation that my little sister and I had during last night’s dinner it was about “The lady in the moon”. We were told different stories of it, those the theme was still the same, it was slightly different. The shape of the card board reminded me of a paper lantern we used to make back when we were kids that’s when I decided to use that story to my book but using the story as I was told.I wanted to incorporate a bit of Mucha Alphonse style in Chang’e(the lady in the moon) character design because from most of the photo references I’ve searched she’s a beautiful young women, her clothe, as her hair as well.

So for the front cover I decided to use some of Muca’s style in creating the boarder and the circle shape in the middle but with abit of Chinese style on the boarder and sketch out my plan.
I tried to print out the images in black and white but I couldn’t get the size right it was quite frustrating but I eventually gave in and started making is by scratch and hand drawn the pieces, I painted the front cover with paint and later found out that I had some blue coloured paper, I mentally slapped my self and used that blue paper to cover the rest of the panel that will be the cover of the book I struggled a bit with drawing the boarders that I ended up changing it simpler and changed the colour of Chang’e dress. I know I couldn’t don’t a bigger piece of this work but I really liked how it looked in this size. I placed a few strands of the hair on top of the drawn one to make it pop as well as the jade rabbit. Using some thin card board I used it to make the clouds and jade rabbit.