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Beasts of the Ancient World: A Kids' Guide to Mythical Creatures This book takes young readers on a captivating journey into the realm of mythological creatures from ancient civilizations. Through the incredible storytelling and majestic illustrations, the reader will uncover the extraordinary tales of legendary beings, including the Japanese Baku, known for its ability to consume nightmares, the sagacious Egyptian Sphinx, and the formidable Minotaur, pitted against Theseus in the gripping Greek myths.
To gather more inspiration for this project, I had the pleasure of visiting the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and The British Museum in London. I was able to have a good look at the gathered artifacts and beautiful objects, and collect material that later on served me to create the illustrations.
Apart from full page and spot illustrations, I also designed ornamental borders. These were carefully illustrated to fit each story, reflect some of the artifacts and elements. The decorative frames I illustrated, are both rich in details and complementing the narrative of each legend and mythology, sometimes in a very playful way.
For the front cover, I illustrated several iconic creatures and characters from the book, many of which are widely recognized, such as Sphynx, Chinese Dragon, Minotaur or Lamassu. In addition to these incredible mythic creatures, the book also features numerous lesser-known gods and beasts, each with stories that are just as fascinating!
For the book, I illustrated numerous illustrations in different formats. There are vignettes of magical characters, full page colorful illustrations, but also several illustrations covering the whole book spread, created to go together with the story text - serve as a background as well as an entertaining image. Each page is a vibrant fusion of text and illustrations, to create a dynamic visual narrative, so that no two pages are alike. Every story and character is given a unique and captivating depiction that brings the ancient world to life.
My favorite part of this project was the amazing creative mix between fiction and non-fiction. In some cases, museum artifacts served as a reference and an anchor point, and in others, I had complete creative freedom when coming up with how the beasts and characters should look. This creative freedom allowed me to really create something magical, and bring vibrant, captivating visuals to life.
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