My pre-thesis project for my 7th semester was to design a children’s book that used all aspects of Visual Communication in its making-visuals, text, colour, and composition.
The project brief given was to pick out an adult book, read it, and make notes of any general concepts within it that interested us (not contextually related to that particular book or story). With this generalised concept, we were to pick one idea that we wanted to communicate to children in the form of a book-this included writing, illustrating, designing, and finally printing the book.
The adult book I started out with was Train to Pakistan. While there were several themes that interested me in the book, I was particularly intrigued by the concept of physical space, and how so often we think of the Partition of India as a division of people and not a demarcation of a piece of land. This led me to realise that we are rarely aware of our physical surroundings, and concentrate more on the people and virtual spaces that fill the entirety of our lives.
The final concept I used to create my book was to personify a place and create a story around the character of this place. I specifically used personification because it is a commonly used literary device for children’s writing, and is very effective in developing empathy and connect with the issue one is trying to communicate.
A detailed documentation booklet that contains the process that went into the creation of this book over 4 months.
The final book. The illustrations are made with a combination of watercolours and scratch art. The purpose of the scratch art is to bring the reader's attention to certain parts of the illustration that are crucial to the story-namely the places and their transformation into animals.
The printed book;
Dimensions: A3 Landscape
Form: Hard-cover with butterfly binding
