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The Edinburgh International Book festival is in full swing and the Illustration department is on board too, proudly presenting ‘House Style 2019’.
This project saw every student, from Stage 1 to MFA2, and all members of staff choose a book published in the UK in the past 20 years and creating one illustration in response.
Everyone was asked to work in black and white as well as one out of 4 available spot colours which were randomly distributed after choosing a book, and part of the challenge was to work with this allocated colour.
The master-list of 150 books was assembled by literary critic Stuart Kelly, who helped us launch the project by giving introductory talk to the department. A big thank you goes out to him for his support.
The resulting works have been printed as postcards and exhibited at the Edinburgh Book festival as a full set, to represent the range of work coming from this Programme, in all its considerable variety.
All postcards are on sale now – grab one while you can!
Two of our recent graduates have every reason to celebrate:
Seobhan Hope’s book ‘Summer’s Sleep’ has been highly commended and Amy Steele has won 3rd prize for her book ‘The Lunchbox’. In this blog post Seobhan and Amy speak about their books and how it feels to be shortlisted for / awarded this prestigious picture book prize.
Shortlisted: Seobhan Hope
“Summer’s Sleep’ is the story of Summer, the giant, who can’t go to sleep. I spent my final year falling in love with and researching folk tales from around Scotland, and was particularly taken by the Story of Samhuinn, or Halloween, where tales tell of a summer and winter king, who fight to see who will be next to rule the kingdom each year in Autumn. I reinterpreted the old tale, wanting to create a meaningful story that was going to encapsulate ideas of sustainability and raise awareness around climate change and global warming in a gentle way. In my story, we find a giant called Summer exhausted, not being able to sleep, and not knowing what to do. He personifies the warm season, which can not end because its gotten too warm for winter to come. Included in the story is also a diverse group of little characters who -slightly cluelessly- set out to help the tired giant. The final result is a colorful, hopefully amusing and thought provoking wee book. The process of coming up with the story, creating the characters and assembling the book was so much fun, and I am delighted it came highly commended at the Macmillan Prize Competition!”
Winner of 3rd prize: Amy Steele
“The Lunchbook is about a banana who lives in the fruit bowl but dreams of making it into the lunchbox. Like all fruit, he wants to be taken to school and eaten up, every bit. But being a banana has its difficulties and Banana ends up lonely in the lunchbox as all his new friends get eaten. As the story goes on, Banana gets more and more forlorn and begins to rot as he struggles with his emotions. The book aims to differ from other books with food characters because these characters WANT to get eaten, which (I hope) makes people laugh.
Being chosen for 3rd place in the Macmillan prize was super exciting and actually, relieving, because I had been so worried about the story all year – the main character essentially dies – so it was a good boost to know that publishers like the idea even though it’s absolutely bonkers! I went down to London for the private view which was really interesting. I enjoyed getting to see all the other entries and chatting to the illustrators – everyone was so talented! Macmillan also asked me to come into their offices and have a chat about my book and my portfolio while I was down, which I did, and it was SO helpful to hear their feedback and encouraging words about my work.”
Picture books are how we learn to read, following the images and letting the character lead you through the narrative. For an illustrator there is loads to get your head around including rhythm and pacing, story curves, character development, how to add drama and tone, balancing text and image on a big page. This is why it a great project to set our Year 2 illustrators! We asked students to design a non-picture book of their choice, mapping out a short dummy book first, then completing two of the spreads as resolved illustrations. Lots used a social issue as their concept, others took a more personal route. Some took a classic picture book form, and others explored a comic form. Here are a few of the results:
A Teaching Fellow in Illustration has been awarded a prestigious Association of Illustrators (AOI) World Award for her recent street art project, “If These Walls Could Talk”. For the twentieth anniversary of Wigtown’s book festival, Astrid Jaekel decorated 11 buildings on the small town’s square with her illustrations.
Astrid’s illustrations were inspired by the townspeopleA Wigtown resident stands outside his shop decorated by Astrid“If These Walls Could Talk” was a temporary project which challenged the perception of how older generations perceive street art, which is often associated with youth culture, and perhaps not the Scottish countryside.
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, many businesses in Wigtown ceased to exist and the small south-west town declined. In 1997, however, it was awarded the status of Scotland’s National Book Town, which has, over time, helped to regenerate the local economy. Now, Wigtown’s many cafés and second-hand bookshops attract book lovers all year round.
Astrid began her project by going door to door around the town square in order to learn about the buildings and find residents who might like to “donate” their houses to be canvases for street art. The town embraced Astrid’s vision.
Astrid decorated buildings with inspiration from the town’s love of books
“I’d like to think that the project made the people of Wigtown feel proud of their town and gave them the chance to continue telling their stories.”
Astrid Jaekel
Many locals have played a major part in growing the book festival as volunteers, and “If These Walls Could Talk” was intended to shine a spotlight on Wigtown and its residents. The project was also meant to encourage visitors to mingle with locals, and to get the visitors to see the place as more than just a charming festival town.
“I’d like to think that the project made the people of Wigtown feel proud of their town and gave them the chance to continue telling their stories to the festival visitors,” said Astrid, “I believe that that’s exactly what street art should do. It should generate conversation and make people reflect upon their surroundings. It should connect people with one another.”
A project of this grandeur proved to require a few extra pair of hands. Astrid enlisted fellow artists as well as ECA graduates, including Irish street artist Joe Caslin.
One set back during the project was Storm Ali. It decided to pay Wigtown a visit just after Astrid installed the wallpapers and many sections were left in tatters or destroyed completely. Through resilience and dedication, though, Astrid and her team managed to repair the damage to produce an award-winning project that seamlessly unites storytelling, illustration and street art while capturing the essence of the small town.
All of the 200 shortlisted entries of the awards will be displayed at an exhibition at Somerset House in London 11 – 28 July, with in-depth presentations of each of the category winning projects.
To learn more about the exhibition, check out Somerset House’s website.
‘Successful artists’ books utilize the whole design and production process to reinforce the message of the subject matter. Shapes, folds, text patterns and materials can be used to nudge the viewer in the direction of the artist’s message, producing a unified coherent statement from the outset’
Bodman, Sarah (2005), Creating Artists’ Books. A&C Black, London.
In the Illustration programme we read books, write books, illustrate books and make books, exploring and playing with picture books, comics, magazines, zines, artists’ books and much more. So we were excited to launch a new elective course in 2019 completely dedicated to using the book form creatively. Students came from a variety of Design backgrounds and broadened their skills in printmaking and bookbinding whilst tackling some quick and low tech publishing of their own. The work was rooted in a historical overview of creative publishing, yet the main rule of the course was simply to play! We cannot wait to see what great projects will emerge next year…
(Banner image: Map of an unmade bed by Sally Delahooke, 2019)
A manifesto in the form of a creative bookwork by Alison Laing, 2019
A-Z is a first year Illustration project celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first conceived, compiled, printed and published in Edinburgh on 10 December 1768.
The project began with a visit to the archives of the National Library of Scotland, where library staff introduced the student group to the original Encyclopaedia Britannica.
After being inspired by the original books, students were asked to each choose one entry and create two pieces of artwork in response:
#Britannica250
In support of the library’s appeal to digitise ‘Britannica’, students created short animated gifs, which are shared across the ECA Illustration and National Library of Scotland’s social media accounts. Use the Twitter and Instagram hashtag #britannica250 to find these lively interpretations of words you may be unfamiliar with. Here are a few examples:
Risograph print
In addition to the animated gifs, the A-Z is a collective book featuring the eighteen chosen Encyclopaedia Britannica entries in the form of risograph prints. The focus of this project was to get students to think about image and text layout and the imaginative interpretation of texts. It also served as an introduction to risograph printing and an exercise in working with a limited colour palette.
This work is currently on display at the National Library of Scotland throughout June, alongside the original Encyclopaedia Britannica.
IT’S DEGREE SHOW TIME AGAIN and we have a lovely eclectic mix of Undergraduate and Master students’ work on display. Don’t miss the chance to see it! The show is open daily from 11.00 – 17.00 until Sunday 9 June. Tonight is Late Night so we’ll be open until 20.00! Looking forward to seeing you on the 4th floor of Evolution House!
And here’s a wee sneak peak of what’s on display..
“Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” – Jack Kerouac
Our first year Illustrators spend the first half of their semester working on a number of poems they were first asked to write and then illustrate. Sources of inspiration were Surrealist word games, biographies linked to Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and Political Protest. The main focus was image and text relationship and composition on the page. As part of this our students also learned to put together the pages of a book digitally and get it printed to a professional standard. Come to BOOKMARKS on Wednesday and you’ll be able to see some of these gems at our first year stall!
At the beginning of ‘Unspoken’ each first year Illustration student was randomly assigned a painting from the Impressionist room at the National Gallery of Scotland. During a visit they were asked study it carefully and later do more research into the story behind their painting and how it relates to the artist who created it.
Based on this research, students developed a wordless sequential narrative in 4 panels, to be submitted as a high-quality digital prints at the end of the project. It was important to be imaginative with the storytelling and interpretation of any research material and to create many recognisable links to the original painting, for example through brushstrokes and colour choice.
The project also served as a first introduction to Photoshop and explored the merging of traditional mark-making and digital applications. The results are wonderfully painterly and deceiving in that they don’t look that digitally-generated at all!
Our final crit took place in public, right in front of the original artwork, and with an unknown audience of gallery visitors. This would be a good reason to be nervous, even for the most experienced of artists, but our first years managed just fine.
So can you guess which paintings our students were looking at?
We just returned from the D&AD New Blood Festival in London where 17 of our recent graduates presented their work to the world. In preparation for the event the group designed their own stand with a ‘Pick n Mix’ concept, which reflected the variety of styles and approaches within their work. Apart from the opportunity of seeing what the rest of the UK’s fresh Illustration, Graphic Design and Animation graduates are up to, this annual event is also an opportunity for them to get valuable advice from industry professionals. Adobe offered portfolio surgeries and there were many other events to attend throughout the 5 days.
The show was a real success with many visitors picking up postcards and business cards and having conversations with our Illustrators about their work and future aspirations. Terri Po and Jo Ruessmann made it onto the ‘One to Watch’ list and were offered a place in the New Blood Academy for this week where they will learn more about how to start their careers as new professional creatives. We are very proud of all of our 2018 graduates and wish them the best of luck for their creative careers!
Sculptural books Bryce Starks-Browning, 2019
