The Gruffalo and Rapunzel Illustrations

The brief for this project was to illustrate characters from the children’s books “Rapunzel” and “The Gruffalo”. For The Gruffalo, I needed to illustrate the mouse and the Gruffalo. I found numerous images of each of the body parts that the book described the Gruffalo as having, such as claws, bad teeth and jaw. I then worked to piece each of these together with a unified illustration. I wanted the Gruffalo to resemble a make believe monster, but also appear playful and cute, as this is not a serious book. In the section of the story I selected, the mouse is attempting to outsmart and stand up to the Gruffalo. I thought having the mouse stand with his hands on his hips, looking up to the Gruffalo would portray this well. I illustrated the Gruffalo book with a relatively high detailed, textured collage. I then scanned the pieces and edited in Photoshop and inDesign to create the book layout. Creating the collage was a long and tedious process, but it was fun.

I used the same collage style for the Rapunzel illustration. The character Rapunzel was illustrated with bold, large areas of coloured card. Her hair, as it is a major feature in the book, was created with an intricate weaving of many different patterns. The tower was built up with individual pieces of paper patterned paper, defining the bricks. The landscape outside the window doesn’t play an important role in this page of the book, therefore an abstract layering of cards sufficed to illustrate this. The contrast between the styles makes the character more prominent.

• Illustration