Friday, March 04, 2005

Years Worth Of Book Illustrations

I always have a blast illustrating our seasonal book packages for work. Maybe too much fun! Sometimes I take digital photos (I take many to get one good one because I am not a photographer), sometimes illustrated, but whatever season, it makes me so happy! When finished, say to myself, I love my job. I love my digital camera. And I brought a few along to show you (sort of like being stuck at someone's house for the vacation slideshow -- but you can click away!)

I tried to set this up to look like the nest had been made from shredded book pages. Bought many nest, tore up lots of pages, but it went so small, just lost the word on the page detail. Still fun.





Scanned in a couple of leaves, cleaned up one side of the leaf, copied, and flopped it so the leaf was symmetrical. Added graphic detail, text from a book. I thought this one worked well for artheds.





The book in grass is one of my favorites. I cut a square out of old book and glued in some plastic grass. The photo illustration was good, but I love all the atmospheric imagery going on too.



This one I sat up on a chair at my back door, with some small pink sea shells, some sand, my handy CoolPix and a printed out Summer Books. Added water in photoshop. Also shot a "message in a bottle" version, but never used it. The disaster was the ice cube experiment. I put each letter of summer books in an ice tray, thinking I would that would sink in the middle of the ice cube, then I spent an entire day trying to make that work. Never did.



When it snowed one day last year, I grabbed a book and ran outside with the digital camera, thinking this will be a great next winter books! Not many liked it at work and I made something else.



Illustration and photo combination, the words becoming the worms. Then used grass and illustrated butterflies for summer.





Passing time at Oregon skatepark, found acorns, and used my little journal as a book, thinking, this might work. It just barely worked, but I used it anyway.



And this Spring Books 2005, I have been drawing many trees and decided to use one of them, with the very condensed font. I love my job.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

They look really great! Excellent pieces as usual.
-Karen

Anonymous said...

Wow, Kim! These are amazing, such creativity! I think my favorite is the "feathered nest". I can really see that image being used by the American Library Association for a promotion. I'm not exactly clear on what your job is but I know they're lucky to have you :) Inspiring!

"Maggie & Kevin" said...

Thank you for sharing the book covers and how you built the concepts. It makes me want to head off in a whole other direction with my work. Where do you find the time to do all this?! :)

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french toast girl said...

Kim, these are GORGEOUS! And I especially dig them since they're all about one of my most favorite things, books. ;)