The Grumble Rumble Mumbler
Loudmouth was approached by Huia Publishers with a storyline written by award winning children's book author Melanie Drewery.
The story is essentially about things that go bump in the night and how it triggers a young child's over imagination.
In the early stages, Huia were unsure of the illustration style they wanted or if they wanted the many scary monsters in the story depicted.
At this point the brief was to appeal to the early reading age.
So it was decided Loudmouth would illustrate a couple of mock -up pages in a reasonably conventional, clean and polished style. From the initial concepts Huia concluded the story needed a looser style, perhaps a more hand crafted, hand drawn feel. Using simple pen drawings and photographic elements Loudmouth met this brief.
The look of collage and depth was created by taking the drawn characters into photoshop, colouring them on a loosely cut white surround and applying filters to give the illusion of cardboard cut outs stuck in the illustration.
Not only were Loudmouth illustrating this book, but also designing the layout and graphics. So at this point a mock up of text was placed.
The text was given a cut and paste look to further the handcrafted look and feel.
Now both illustrator and and publisher were happy this was the way to proceed. Characters and fonts were developed further during the process of roughing up the whole book.
The question still remained, whether the monsters in the story should be illustrated? They didn't really exist, they were only a figment of the child's imagination.
The prospect of not drawing these rich and vibrant characters didn't really appeal to an illustrator, so Loudmouth proposed placing the monsters behind opening flaps. The opening of the flap exposes the monsters, revealing an insight to the child's imagination.
The Final product was award winning.
The story is essentially about things that go bump in the night and how it triggers a young child's over imagination.
In the early stages, Huia were unsure of the illustration style they wanted or if they wanted the many scary monsters in the story depicted.
At this point the brief was to appeal to the early reading age.
So it was decided Loudmouth would illustrate a couple of mock -up pages in a reasonably conventional, clean and polished style. From the initial concepts Huia concluded the story needed a looser style, perhaps a more hand crafted, hand drawn feel. Using simple pen drawings and photographic elements Loudmouth met this brief.
The look of collage and depth was created by taking the drawn characters into photoshop, colouring them on a loosely cut white surround and applying filters to give the illusion of cardboard cut outs stuck in the illustration.
Not only were Loudmouth illustrating this book, but also designing the layout and graphics. So at this point a mock up of text was placed.
The text was given a cut and paste look to further the handcrafted look and feel.
Now both illustrator and and publisher were happy this was the way to proceed. Characters and fonts were developed further during the process of roughing up the whole book.
The question still remained, whether the monsters in the story should be illustrated? They didn't really exist, they were only a figment of the child's imagination.
The prospect of not drawing these rich and vibrant characters didn't really appeal to an illustrator, so Loudmouth proposed placing the monsters behind opening flaps. The opening of the flap exposes the monsters, revealing an insight to the child's imagination.
The Final product was award winning.
