ILLUS5050: Book Illustration Research

For this brief we had two illustrations to create for a ghost story, I had Martin's Close, a story about a man in the 1600s who was trialled and executed for a murder of a young girl and is subsequently haunted by her before his demise. I actually ended up really enjoying the story told and I was excited to come up with drawings for it and come up with ideas and research. 

My first thought went to Junji Ito, one of my favourite horror artists of all time, he is amazing at conveying all sorts of horror from the macabre to the psychologically disturbing and I wanted to take influence on his expressive characters and haunting drawings that often times send shivers down your spine. 

I also ended up researching horror artists in general, I tend to stick to the theme or genre of the drawing when it comes to research so coming up with ideas I tend to find things that will specifically influence me for the ideas I want to come up with. This artist is called Ben Fenton, who I love the slight obscurity of the people he draws. It's the creepiness of the unknown faces. 

Here's some more work I took influence from for my work, I like the mistiness of the watercolour effect.

I also took a look at some header drawings for chapters and found some really interesting ones. The idea of a chapter header illustration going across both pages is very interesting and would be a way to go with a concept although I am unsure whether it would breach the briefs task.