Brave New World Project

The following images which include one binding design and three book illustrations are created for the Folio Society Competition. The chosen book this year is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

The binding design-----"The optimum population...is modelled on the iceberg-eight-ninths below the water line,one-ninth above."

Illustration 1 for Chapter V :"He heard nothing, nobody was coming...when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuggled."

Illustration 2 for Chapter XI: "Looking down through the window...the savage could see Lenina's upturned face, pale in the bluish light ...the mouth was open.."

Illustration 3 for Chapter XVIII: "He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with a start that he was singing..."

After this project, I will move to my graduation project---creating a series of fantasy illustration of my own story. Need to work harder.

book jackets illustration

I have created five book jackets for Alain de Botton' s five books:
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Essays In Love
Kiss & Tell
The Consolation of Philosophy
The Art of Travel

The design for the gift box of the five books.

It was a great joy to read the masterpiece from Alain de Botton, and I found more enjoyable moments in showing the ideas with my own visual language.

Illustrations for the original story "Mrs Fang"

After keeping drawing for 2 months, I finally finished the illustrations for my own story "Mrs Fang". It is a dark and fantastic story happening in a city called the Grey-Walled City where there are only skyscrapers and factories, and there is a woman called Mrs Fang who sell magical puppets that could do anything for their masters, but there is a rule, the owner must remember every puppet's name. Once forget this rule, something horrible will happen. A little girl bought some puppets to build her dream lands.......

As there will be two different worlds in my story, one is the dark real world in Grey-Walled City, the other one is the fantastic worlds built by the puppets, I applied two different visual strategies. For the real world, I made 2D paintings and the major colors are grey, black and brown and orange, resulting in a depressing atmosphere. For the fantastic land, I created 3D paper- cutting and used vivid and bright color, leading to happy atmosphere but also slightly in chaos and unreal.

My inspiration came from the amazing Japanese Animation called Pet Shop of Horror. I learn from it the character and scene design, Chaos control as well as atmosphere construction.  Furthermore, it inspires me to create some high-quality illustrations which could show my reflection of psychology.  

Here are some paintings (watercolor):

  

"There is a metropolitan where there is no plant, animal, playground or joy, but only factories and skyscrapers, few people have ever heard of this city, and citizens there call it “Grey Walled City”. Children there, at first, all have wildest imagination about magical things and they could see a fat woman dressing in black floating in the air. But once they grow up, they lose their curiosity, just like their parents. "

"One day, a curious little girl came to buy puppets， Mrs. Fang showed her some buttons and told her that once she put these buttons on the puppets, she could order anything from them. However, there is a rule, she must remember all the names of the puppets she activate, something horrible would happen if she forgot one name."

"The girl wished to have a natural garden, so the puppets built her a garden where there were lots of precious plants that died out a long time ago. Some tropical plants are so big that the girl could hide herself inside the flower bags."

"The terrified girl rushed to the Chinese temple to ask for help, but she felt more scared when she saw, inside the dark room, more than one hundred fat ladies who wearing in black are floating in the air, all in same masks. One of the ladies came in front of the girl and told her that it was she who sold her the puppets , and she was a puppet."

I am quite satisfied with the final outcomes and I want to continue to create more pictures, making a book which contains less words and more drawings.

doodling of clowns

While  most people think the clowns are dark and scary, I think they are very romantic , of course I am not talking about the evil clown, but those who always ware masks and hide all their feelings.

it is a self-portrait