We had written feedback after submitting final colours for our fourth literature brief with Rotopol (see my previous literature brief work with Nosy Crow, Bloomsbury and Quarto) this time focussing on creating a 12 page laparello focussing on nature in the city.
Literature brief's with Pathways Into Children's Publishing are culminations of the sessions and workshops we do weekly and are set for mentees by publishers to explore what it would be like to work with them on a live project as a commissioned illustrator.
After such an incredible experience working with the team at Nosy Crow, Bloomsbury and Quarto and having never worked on a concertina book before, I was really excited to get started with this project. It also happened to coincide with the anthology illustration I was working on, which meant that both projects fed into the themes of eachother.
We had our initial briefing over Zoom with Mariela Nagle from Mundo Azul, a consultant, project manager and lecturer for alternative educational projects and events, with a focus on diversity in children's and youth literature and in the education system.
The brief was to illustrate a 12 page silent laparello themed around nature in the city. It was a very open brief, we were free to interpret this in any way we chose. Pathways alumni were split up between a few different international publishers, I was paired with Rotopol Press, which was very exciting having learned about the publishing house and the work that they produce during previous courses in the Pathways programme.
I started by sketching out some very rough scribbles and ideas, I created a dummy book to see if the concertina and cut-outs I wanted to include would work and submitted my work ready for our first round of feedback via Zoom.
FIRST ROUGHS
I had some really helpful feedback from Rita Fürstenau at Rotopol Press and moved on to updating the roughs and working on colours ready for the final submission.
FINAL COLOURS
It was a completely new experience working on a laparello and knowing that I enjoy a bit of paper engineering, I had to take advantage of the opportunity to create a cut-out interactive effect. Though we had the anthology to work on and I was busy with another client picture book project around this time which meant I had to seriously manage my schedule to fit everything in, I thoroughly enjoyed this project and would love to develop it a little more.
Looking forward to year two and literature brief 5!