Inspiration

The work of Oliver Jeffers is a fantastic source of inspiration for my final illustration style:

Layout sketches

Attempting all out sketches for my spreads was a good and bad thing- good news is that now I know all the things I have to change like page size, medium and typography style.
The bad news is I wasted an entire week!

Book Narrative v.2

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The Gastro Gang

Ma

Review 3

Diploma Review 3

Friday 20^th August

Panel: Arathi, Geetu & Nupur

Feedback:

·         Think about editing your narrative to make it more visual. Your colours and illustrations should take precedent as children prefer looking at images than read. Visuals also have a better impact.

·         Think about the appearance of your characters- what they wear, things like that. Will your target audience (urban middle and upper middle class Indian children) be able to identify with them?

·         Can you think of other ways by which your reader will be able to identify with your character? What characteristics of Cheeku will bind your reader to him? For e.g. do your character collect things? Children like collecting objects (bottle caps, earthworms in a jar). Find out what are the things children like.

·         Perhaps you should introduce the terms Gastronauts and Eco in the initial chapters of your book instead of just at the end as it is the crux of the narrative. The reader should become familiar with the terms.

·         Finish your book first and the other products will follow as the book is the pivot of the entire set  which includes the book, a twin set of canvas bags and aprons (for an adult and child), and a set of 6 table mats.

·         Can you think of how your story characters and events can translate onto the products instead of having separate content for them? Perhaps each of the characters is on a separate table mat. E.g. Geetu had made table mats by recycling old calendars and her children would want the mat which had their birthday month. How can the products engage the user in more ways than one?

Deliverables:

·         A prototype of the narrative in the actually size, shape of the book with complete art work and typography for another review to be held at 11 am, Friday 27^th August.

Pa

The Balcony Botanist

Meet Cheeku

Tiny Flip Book Prototypes

1) Accordion fold Spine with cut out flaps:

2) Perfect Bound spine with  pasted on flaps

Flip Books and Gate Folds

Advantages: 

• Dramatic way to gain a reader’s attention.
• Good to show layers of information.
• Interactive element.

Disadvantages:

• Makes the book less durable.

Simple Gatefold

Cut outs that can be flipped over:

Flip book using thick paper where the flips are "hidden" and have to be prised open:

Book narrative v1

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Readings

"All you do is to look,
 At a page in this book,
 Because that's where we always will be.
 No book ever ends,
 When it's full of your friends,
 The Giraffe and the Pelly and me."
- Roald Dahl

6.08.10 Mystic Montessori

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Why is there a "yearning" to live a Sustainable Lifestyle'

Why Sustainability?

To stay useful, sustainability must mean more than merely surviving or trying to keep a degraded world from getting worse. Otherwise, why bother? Invoking nature's capacity for sustaining life, as Fritjof Capra suggests, is critical. A sustainable community worth imagining is alive, in the most exuberant sense of that word — fresh, vital, evolving, diverse, and dynamic. It cares about the quality as well as the continuation of life. It is flexible and adaptive. It draws energy from its environment, celebrates organic wholeness, and appreciates that life has more to reveal than human cleverness has yet discovered. It teaches its children to pay attention to the world around them, to respect what they cannot control, and to embrace the creativity with which life sustains itself.

Fortunately, observes Centre for Ecoliteracy cofounder Fritjof Capra,

“We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms.

Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honour, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life”.

- Centre for Eco Literacy

“Our yearnings are always for a paradise that has been lost through our own making- through foolishness, corruption or greed; such stories appear time and again in the world’s mythologies and religious texts... In the Bible Adam and Eve’s disobedience results in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, to which we are forever trying to return. Similarly, today we point to our own recklessness and indulgence inn destroying hacitats, air quality, water quality and the ozone layer and are now striving to regain a vanquished ideas through something we have termed sustainable development.”

- Sustainable by Design / Stuart Walker

• A sustainable community is the idea- the contemporary Garden of Eden that we are trying to create. It may seem impractical but that doesn’t make less important or the right thing to aspire for.
• We are trying to move towards a better future, and mend our consumption methods to make them more sustainable not to achieve an end state- but to taking on the task of learning how to live in the world.
• Sustainable living in a way preaches an ideal way of life, like in the Bhagvad Gita or Bible, except it’s completely secular and made relevant for today’s world and society so that it can be accepted by us. We are yearning to move towards it as it is the known "ideal" that can help improve our and the planet's well being.