This is my first digital interactive picture book. Some of the illustrations change when the mouse goes over them :)

Christmas Project

Over the Chrismas period I choose to explore narrative

and sequencial illustration. My initial idea was to create a comic or story book based on our one day project, however I soon realised I wanted to explore many aspects of narrative and explore how a stories may be seen and experienced

digitally; not just in print.

After a visit to the National Gallery and researching into narrative art I discovered that there are various ways to tell a story through image. I tried exploring many of these in my experimental work, using the story we created in our one day project as a basis. However this story I found difficult to illustrate and after looking into the work of Aidan Koch I was inspired to base my work on as much life drawing as possible. So I went on to use my own observational studies of everyday people to create narratives.

Above are some examples of monoscenic narrative

Sequential Narrative (comic book style)

Continuous narrative

After exploring these forms of narrative art I researched comics and picture books and chose to experiment with converting these into a digital form. With the rise of devices such as ipads, iphones and kindles I feel it's important that

narrative illustration is a form that can be used both in print and digitally.

initial illustration

final illustration

I chose to link my story loosely to the one day project which gave me freedom to write about something important to me and still base most of my images on drawing from observation. Above is the initial illustration for my digital picture book, however I chose to simplify it and draw from life. I feel the final piece is stronger and would translate better into black and white print if I wished to turn my story into a printed book

I wanted to make my digital book interactive, even if it's just clicking a button to turn the page. I used Adobe Flash to create interesting buttons and put together the book. I also managed to create interactive illustrations that change when the mouse is rolled over the image. I think this way of reading and interacting with books is really important and is sure to progress in the future.

A sketchbook page of ideas that need developing... hopefully in summer when I will have some time!