A Trip to the Moon stood out for me due
to its poetic quality and the rich imagery within the text. Moreover, even though mankind
has already made several trips to the moon, the moon still remains a mysterious
and dreamlike destination. Thus, in response to the more fantastical nature of
the text (with a snip of a cloud/ we will
make a ship), I decided to make my illustrations less scientifically accurate
and more like something out of a child’s imagination.
When I
formed the characters, I mainly thought about silhouettes and colour. Firstly,
they must be identifiable from a distance, and secondly, they had to stand out
against a dark night sky. Ergo, colours such as black or even dark blue were
ruled out from the get go. I decided to make the girl have orange hair that had
the shape of a cloud, so that the colour would stand out in the mostly dark
blue backgrounds while still staying with the theme. As for the baby boy, I
decided to give him a rabbit onesie to give him a better silhouette, as babies
are generally lacking in the hair department and thus have a rather uninteresting
spherical head shape.
In the
first of the three illustrations, I imagined a pair of young children about to
undertake the trip to the moon, armed with nothing but a simple plan and their
abundant imaginations. I chose a rather simple and bright colour palette, to
give a version of what a child’s room might look like. To emphasize their
possible obsession with aviation and air travel, I also gave their blue walls
some cloud decals and attached a space themed mobile on their ceiling. I also
had to tweak my initial composition of this spread, as the original had no area
in which I could fit any text. In the end I managed to space apart the girl and
the bed and thus make the whole composition look far less cluttered.
In the
second illustration, they are already travelling through the moonlit clouds. I
decided to use a bed tethered to a whale cloud because I thought it would be
awesome. Also, a natural habitat for a whale cloud would naturally be in a sea
of clouds, haha. I tried to continue the theme of fantasy by texturing the
clouds in an unusual way.
In the
third illustration, they have landed on the tip of the moon and are looking
down on their fields and on their house. The fields are also candy coloured to
keep with the theme. I also framed the image with clouds in order to keep the
composition dynamic even though the main characters are mostly just sitting
down. This way, the readers’ eyes are drawn in a circular fashion from the house
to the moon, then to the text, and then back again to the house.
