Roald Dahl

I have decided to enter the Roald Dahl YCN award. This brief fits in with my practice and I think it would provide a good platform to improve certain elements of my practice. The brief is to illustrate "a series of iconic scenes" from Roald dahl's children's stories. This year I have been trying to work more with complete scenes rather then just character design, this brief will help me develop skills in creating full scenes and working with a narrative. the brief states that I can chose to illustrate characters from multiple stories but that they should form "a coherent series".

As with the Adrian Mole brief the subject matter has been illustrated on a number of occasions previously. Roald Dahl's writing will forever be associated with the illustrations of Quentin Blake. I think it is important to try and learn from Quentin Blake's illustration but not to try and emulate them. The brief asks for illustrations that are not "boring, safe, or predictable". The only real constraint on the illustrations are that they should compliment the Roald Dahl logo in some way e.g. colour scheme.

I can chose to illustrate between 1 and 3 scenes but the series must contain 3 characters,"one child character, one villain character and one fantastical creature". This allows a great deal of flexibility for my illustrations, the scenes are not limited to one character per scene if I chose to make 3 scenes. I will need to put a lot of thought and research into what makes a "coherent series", it could mean a continuous narrative, or elements that link the scenes together, or a theme that runs through all three. I will read some of Roald Dahls work to try and find links between books that could help me with this.

the brief talks about introducing young people Roald dahl's work. the core audience for the stories are children between 5 and 11. I will need to keep this in mind when illustrating the stories to try and appeal to the target audience and also to make sure the illustrations are suitable for the age bracket.

As the aim is to introduce new people to Roald dahl's work my main focus will be to try and bring his writing to life, he created amazing worlds in his stories and I want to be able to do them justice and spark the imagination of the target audience.

This brief is for 'The Roald Dahl Literary Estate' who have recently developed a brand identity to tie together the many different interpretations of Roald Dahl's work from the original books to films, musicals and apps. They describe themselves as

"– MASTERS of invention!
– MAKERS of mischief!
– CHAMPIONS of good! "

I think it is important that I keep these three statements in mind as I work on this brief. The idea of the images I create is that they represent the brand and therefore represent these statements.