Final Major Project: Spring Break


 The Easter holidays ― a time for family, chocolate, and illuminating letters . . .



Theme of week five in the ‘comfort of creativity’ self-coaching program is ~ Map your circles of influence ― set your boundaries & intentions

I revisited notes I had made over the Christmas break, exploring the foundations of what it means to live a good life: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ‘simple, uneventful life’ of the Shakers.



I printed out the very rough first draft of what I’ve been calling my ‘wonder-book’ (inspired by childhood compendiums of facts and stories) and while I liked a lot of the visuals ― the blue of the cover, the beautiful effect of printing flower photographs on the soft grey hue of the recycled paper ― as a whole it isn’t working. I sat and thought back to that phrase which shone out from last week’s tutorial: what would it be to make ‘a hug in a book’? Something a lot simpler than this bulky collection of writing. A hug is giving, listening, opening; and that is what I want this FMP to be. I made a new ‘bookling’ with the words that speak ‘hug’ to me: joy | hope | comfort | space | calm | peace | kind | soft | gentle

I doodled how those words might be represented visually, and played around with some mandala-esque illustrations in Procreate. I’m thinking about cards, wondering whether the illustrations can be made to flow in a book format or whether that will be better with photographs or textured backgrounds. 



Strangely, I’ve also been thinking about Christmas this Easter: the book I’ve written/compiled is off to the text designer and I am creating some illustrations for chapter openers. Lucy Rose illustrated the cover and some elements we can use as flourishes so I wanted to echo her style through to the wreath, garland and illuminated letters. I liked this Shutterstock alphabet and these found vintage illuminations and played around to bring in the cover elements to an embellished lettering style that would sit comfortably alongside text set in Baskerville.



This work inspired me to bring some experiments with illuminated letters into the FMP. I used the colour palette created for the ‘Dot’ picture book project and want to develop further by adding colour to the background and/or borders. The moon also features in the Christmas book and I want to make a perpetual lunar calendar for the FMP, so I illustrated phases of the moon and did some experiments to work out a template for creating printed ‘booklings’ from a single sheet of A4.



Oh, and this week’s colour walk was inspired by brown (I guess I had chocolate on my mind!)


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