Visual Style further inspiration

I mentioned previously in my blog that I want to develop further my visual style. In order to do this I am going to look at as many different sources of inspiration in terms of style as possible. I am still very clear that I want to have a simple and cute visual style but I think in order to come up with something which suits my story the best it will be better to look at as many existing sources as I can.

In particular I want to pay attention to colour palette and texture as I want to make my digital narrative look like a traditional children's paperback in some way.

Visual style in children’s picture books.

In order to get a wider range of visual style influences I went to the library and looked at lots of different children’s picture books. While looking further at them it was clear to me that the visual style of the images in the book matched perfectly the mood or genre of the story they represented, which seems obvious to me now that I’ve really thought about it but I don’t think I really considered what mood I wanted to create with my imagery.

Examples I looked at:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of my favourite books when I was younger and I still vividly remember it now. I think because it was so different visually to other books it stayed in my mind. I really like the clever use of page layout and the textures used really make it feel like the illustrations have been cut out of materials rather than drawn. I definitely need to consider texture a lot more in my artwork in order to give it that classic picture book feeling that I want to achieve.

The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister

I really love the visual style of The Rainbow Fish. It's very bright and simple as it is aimed at younger children. I also really like the use of different textures as some of the scales on the fish are made with shiny materials to really make them stand out. Something I have noticed in children's picture books is the use of texture as well as colour. This has given me a lot of inspiration for my own visual style.

‘The Orchard Book of Mythical Birds and Beasts’ – Margret Mayo and illustrated by Jane Ray

This book is a lot more traditional than the other books I looked at, both in terms of content of story and visual style. The book describes several different tales that surround different  mythological beasts. The illustrations match the style of the content and the mood of the language. There is a lot more text in this book than the others so the style of the layout of pages is obviously a lot different. Because the stories are from different cultures the imagery has a feeling of being traditional and old. It also tries to match the ethnicity of the story, for example, there is a tale which has origins in North America so the designs on the page are very Native American in style.

 ‘Vunce Upon a Time’  Siobhan Vivian Illus. J.otto Seibold

This book has an obviously humorous tone to it and features a light subject matter therefore the mood of the book is very light hearted. The illustrations match the mood of the story perfectly and therefore they work in harmony to portray the story. The visuals are very striking and simple and fit the simplistic language and basic style of the story. There is also an interesting use of typography which is something else that I hadn’t really considered in my own work. This can be a good way to draw attention to a word or phrase in particular or to help describe the word by making it look like the thing the word is describing.

From doing this research I have a much better understanding of the need for the visuals to match the tone of the story. I want my narrative to have a magical feel to it so I need to make the visual style a lot more magical. The visuals I ended up with after my development in BA7 are much too harsh, I want to soften them up a lot more in order for them to fit with the delicate subject matter in my narrative.