The Dummy Book

This is the dummy book I made, and it indicates where the text goes in relation to the imagery. This is what should usually be presented to the publisher so that they would have a basic idea of what the end product is going to look like. In case they believe that something needs to be changed, they notify the artist to make the appropriate changes to the artwork. 

The brief was asking for a finished cover design, endpapers, and 3 double page spreads but unfortunately I misinterpreted the information and at first proceeded making detailed artwork for the whole of the book, which had it's drawbacks. Ultimately, when I realised I was wrong about the brief I was able to create more time to plan out or enhance the remaining pieces. 

Not all of the designs are considered to be final just because they are fully colored, since there are some that I really like and others that I believe could have been brought up a bit more carefully had I been given more time and mental space to concentrate. I understand that some aspects of my work may have been a little rushed-through, but my better efforts this year have shown that this would not normally have happened- given what I thought I had to do.

I am overally satisfied with my work on this unit and though I know that I am not even close to my full potential, it is very obvious to me that my compositional as well as my techincal skills have constantly been improving . Naturally, the story itself played a very important role in inspiring me and instigating thoughts and imagery in my mind, as I was fascinated by it's many diverse possibilities of interpretation.

I also found it interesting having to implement the text in the imagery, but there is certainly a lot more room for experimentation with it.The amount of effort, as well as the dedication I have put to this project are probably illuminated in some of my illustrations.

Cover Design

The Endpapers

Title & Copyright Pages

The Narrative

Development

Sketchbook Scans

These are scans from my development work. This has been a tough challenge in terms of selecting a particular visual language, given the many points of view the text can be perceived from.

This is an alteration of a character I designed back in the summer and at first I thought him to be the perfect character for what I had in mind. In the meantime, while designing the rest of the characters I produced some rather satisfying and some dissapointing results as well.

Wasn't particularly fond of Pelayo as a character, so I am not really surprised that I didn't have many ideas for him

This design of the spider woman kind of reminds me of Quentin Blake's characters, whose I am a huge fan. I had some problems trying to get her right from different angles, and I also couldn't find an interesting way to blend the head with the body.

I had many thoughts about father Gonzaga and tried to discover his background and have had some interesting and some rather ridiculous results.

Apart from the one on the left, I really liked my designs for the neighbour woman, but in the end I thought that a person who knows a lot about life and death should probably be much older than that.

Elisenda Is probably my favourite character of the story since I have found some connections between her character and reactions and mine. I wanted to base her in Ancient Greek Statues, and to be more precise of the goddess Estia, who was the goddess of Home, warmth and hospitality. Ironically, of course.

                                       

As I love literature, I couldn't help but proceed to analyze the literate aspects of the story in order to dig out hints and ideas that could determine the emotion and overall output of the artwork. This process really helped me a lot to gain a better understanding of the intentions of the author and the direction of the story.

I looked at possible page formats and then proceeded into splitting the story and numbering it in key events in order to better organize the facts that occurred and have an easier way to view the story as a whole and proceed to choosing what to illustrate.

next logical thing to do was to start storyboarding and stripping out my possible compositional ideas. Working in a small scale at first is really helpful when composing images since it really lets you see the page as a whole and not be distracted by things as the quality of the technique, color, or lines.

As always, there were some moments of inspiration and some moments of confusion, but in the end after interrogating myself and the text, I got the hints that I needed in order to proceed to the finals.

The size and shape of the book were determined by the original artwork and not otherwise as usual.

The thing I decided to do last was the cover design. I thought it was a good idea to do the rest first in order to be able to grasp a general sense of my illustrations and try to bring that sense out in the cover artwork. I believe that i have succeeded, even though some of the spreads included in my dummy do like they do not really "fit in" as well with the others.

The cover design I decided to work with in the end was the one on the right. Since the story starts "In medias res" I thought that it would be very interesting to try and guess, or more correctly, create an image that occurred before the narrative starts. It was only logical that the man must have fallen from the sky so I chose the safe option to illustrate him during his mid-fall.

Passage

This is the story that I chose to illustrate:

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur

he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise
and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

“He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”
On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal.
Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the

fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he
only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.
His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.
The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.
The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable
in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because
he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.
Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to

the priest’s tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape

but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically
a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the
sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with
high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed
it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning
the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not
get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation

to listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he

was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up

in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea. 

The story falls in the genre of magic realism, which is highly related to surrealism, with the major difference being that surrealism mainly explores the psychology of humans and their "inner life", while magic realism presents the extraordinary in a material reality.

In magic realism, magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise realistic environtment. "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" is a part of a short story collection from Marquez, called "Leaf Storm". The storry is written in medias res, or, in the middle of things. There is a main narrator in the story and it's general theme is exploring the human reactions to the unknown. There is a great deal of symbolism in this story:
 The old man's image captures the balance of sublimity and crudity that dominates the story. He is ordinary with a supernatural touch.
Events happen sometimes "out of time", for instance, Pelayo and Elisenda were surprised by the man's appearence but yet over it very quickly without the author telling us the reason why.
The people respond to the old man's signs of divinity with surreal indifference, for example the way they interpret his language is weird, and also the fact that they nderstand totally different things from each other.
The story examines the human response to those who are weak, dependent and different.
It is a fairy tale about interpretation, it defies attempt at interpretation even though it stages the human need to interpret.
Marquez suggest that the presentation of an object can be more important than the object itself - no one is particularly awestruck by an old weak man, wings or no wings - They turn to the spider woman instead. What would have happened if he was dressed in white or sat on a throne?
Other famous and noteworthy works Of Marquez include "One Hundred Years Of Solitude", "Autumn of the Patriarch" and "Love in the Time of Cholera".
Artists associated with magic realist art include: Ivan Le Lorraire Albright, George Toukev, Marcela Donoso, Peter Doig, Felice Casorati, Glan Paaolo Dulbecco, Jared French, Gayane Khauchaturian and Cavel Willink.

Artists

These are works of artists I looked at over the past weeks. These examples have really helped me towards understanding fundamentals of composition and really challenged me when I was trying to figure out the way they were processed. In the end, I don't think that my work looks like any of these, but was surely influenced by them.

Vincent Van Gogh

The emotions that he manages to capture in every single one of his artworks never cease to amaze me. His broad range of strokes and color pallete are things that every artist should aspire to reach. Starry Night is probably my favourite painting!

Wilmslow Homer

I believe that Wilmslow Homer's work has greatly inspired me for this proejct. He seems to be closely related to nature and especially with seascapes and the daily ordinary life of common people. The way he manages to achieve beautiful contrast within a light coloured pallete is what has especially attracted me.

Quentin Blake

I have always been a major fan of Quentin Blake's work - I have been reading Roald Dahl's books since I can remember myself. His figures are characterised by ingenious simplicity and the way he handles the white space is something that only a few artist can achieve. He mostly works with a pen and watercolors, which is very admirable given the fact that his artwork often looks a lot more complicated and thought-through that meets the eye. I would love to see some more mature work from him, even though I doubt that is ever going to happen since he has long established his visual language.