Saturday 9 July 2011

Book jackets

Here follows a couple of book jacket illustrations I did during my final year as a student at Falmouth, using colour reduction linocut printing.



I enjoyed the printing and cutting process, although sometimes it was slightly exhausting. By the end of the project even my blisters had blisters!

I did have some trouble with the latter illustration (for Andy Merrifield's The Wisdom of Donkeys) in that I was perhaps a bit ambitious in the number of colours (and hence layers) it involved. In the end I was able to achieve the above artwork by printing each colour layer onto separate white paper, and then combining them using the miracles of computer technology.

I feel that this year's sporadic foray into the realms of lino printmaking has been an interesting and worthwhile thing, especially since publishers and art directors who reviewed my portfolio in New York mostly responded better to this "more sophisticated" style of work than my painterly children's illustration.