Brave New World

Hey there, and a happy Saturday to you all! I figured its about time I had a waffle about a project/competition I worked on a few months ago. Late last year, I decided I was going to enter the House of Illustration's annual competition. This year's competition was to create 3 illustrations and a book jacket design for the 1931 novel, Brave New World (by Aldous Huxley). And so I gave it a go!

Front Cover

"And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer's afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim spectres of men and women..."

"Then the leader gave a signal, and one after another, all the snakes were flung in the middle of the square; an old man camp up from underground and sprinkled them with corn meal, and from the other hatchway came a woman and sprinkled them with water from a black jar."

"Now who wants a chocolate eclair?" she asked in a loud, cheerful tone. "Me!" yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely forgotten."

I really enjoyed this competition, I liked the chance of reading a book I hadn't thought of reading before and interpreting it in my own way. I consider myself to be a bit of a book geek, and I have a secret desire to read every single book in the world (knowing this to be an impossible feat, I am content in just trying to read any book I can - especially any classics)! Brave New World is a really interesting novel and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone!

Unfortunately I didn't get placed in this competition (which I wasn't surprised at) but thats not going to put me off entering next year!

Although I did have a lot of fun with this competition, there are many aspects of my illustrations I wish I could go back and change! I didn't give myself a lot of time to work on this project, and so felt forced into drawing in a certain style that was comfortable for me, when I would have liked to have researched and experimented more, pushing myself to try something new. This is also true about the colour schemes and subject matter I chose for certain pictures. I just wish I had given myself more time to have a play with these things. But hey ho!

Heres a few photos of the work in progress. I'm a big fan of hand drawn images, so to me, that was the only route to take! (I think also because I work on a computer for most of the day, in my free time I like to take my eyes away from that and physically draw things for a change).

These are just a few of my initial (and hastily drawn) sketches - looking at subject matter, layout and the like.


I sketched my final images out and used a dip pen with black indian ink to outline them. Its in these stages I always prefer the look of my illustration to the final piece. I hate losing all the mark making (haven't used that term since college!) I made in the drawing phase...


... which is why I try to get those pencil lines back in the final illustration! To colour I use water colour paints and then watercolour pencils to get that rough sketchy feel back into the piece.
I sometimes wonder what the illustrations would have looked like without any outlines...and whether that could have improved them. Although for that sort of thing I need a light box - which I am looking into buying in the next couple of months.

So there we go, that was the Brave New World project I gallivanted with a few months back. You can go look at the 25 runners up for this competition by heading on over HERE.