Book Illustration | Folio Society Competition

I’ve been waiting to show you this book illustration project for a while now, and finally, I can now show them all to you! I was just holding tight until the deadline (which was today) to show them all to you, so here goes!

Here’s my illustration’s for The Folio Society’s ‘Book Illustration Competition 2015’, which you can see below.

The brief asked creatives to produce 3 illustrations and a binding illustration in response to Folio’s ‘Ghost Stories’.

This book is a collection of three stories published by The Folio Society – ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘The Upper Berth’ and ‘A Tale of an Empty House’, which are really interesting to develop illustrations for – which I thoroughly enjoyed.

I began by reading the stories in full and examining the parts which I enjoyed the most. After this, I sketched my main ideas into my sketchbook, which you can see below.

With all of these illustrations, I wanted to communicate a spooky and atmospheric nature – which hopefully I’ve achieved successfully.

All of these internal book illustrations have been produced with watercolour, goauche and edited in Photoshop, whilst the book cover illustration has been produced in Adobe Illustrator, which was really fun to produce.

Brief Summary Of This Book Illustration Project

Here’s a brief summary of each of the illustrations below;

The Treasure of Abbot Thomas – The book tells the spooky story of the hunt for the treasure of Abbot Thomas. The characters go on the hunt for this treasure, and are confronted with clues to where the treasure is, one being the church windows – which is where I decided to focus on.

‘The Upper Berth’ – Within the ‘upper berth’ of this ship, certain passengers would haul themselves over board during the night, without anyone understanding why. They regarded this part of the ship as bad luck, and no one would dare to sleep in there again.

However, the main character of the book decides to test this theory and sleep within the upper berth, and is confronted with a unusual and frightening character.

‘A Tale of an Empty House’ – After walking through the swamp, and enjoying the British fresh air, the main character comes across a lone and isolated house. He comes back with his colleague, and much like ‘The Upper Berth’, is confronted by a character that no one can describe.

I hope you enjoy my illustration’s for Folio Society’s ‘Book Illustration Competition 2015’ – and hopefully the judges like my illustration’s too!

The longlist is announced on Monday 2 February, so here’s hoping!

Be sure to let me know what you think of my illustrations in the comments below – I’ll love to hear what you think.

Many thanks for listening and visiting my news page today. You can follow what I’m up to on my Twitter, Facebook or Google + pages, I’ll really appreciate it if you do, and don’t be afraid to say hi to me! Many thanks again, and have a great day!

The Book Illustration Competition 2015 Folio Society - Sketchbook Pages