Joshua
Art Director: Madison Grube
Copywriter: Madison Grube
Synopsis:
Joshua is a short story about a child who grows up with the idealistic fantasy of friendship with a cousin she doesn’t know. Her family and his hardly meet or speak, aside from a yearly Christmas card sent only as a courtesy. Between the annual card and one meeting, she forms a charming persona and that is later crushed by a reality of who he is and who he has become following a tour in Iraq.
I kindly ask that you mostly just look at this for the art direction, as I wrote this when I was 15 and have since learned to trust the copywriters around me :)
Style:
llustrating this story started with a desire to visualize a child’s voice and an adult’s subject matter, which brought me to primary colors and construction paper. This style was adapted to fuse those two components together in a way that was different and visually appealing.
Process:
Step 1: Illustrator
The first thing I did was map out each spread in Illustrator. Each illustration is dependent on the copy on that page. Laying everything out here first allowed me to organize the entire book meticulously, so that there would be no surprises later on. After the spreads were complete I printed each one out to scale and cut each shape out of construction paper.
Step 2: Layer paper
Next I used the cut construction paper layers to create exact copies of what I had made in illustrator. Under each layer I rolled drafting tape and cast a light on the spread to create shadows and depth and bring out the texture of the construction paper. I then photographed of each spread.
Step 3: Add text
Next, I put each photograph on a separate page in an InDesign document, and added the copy back where I had originally allotted it in the Illustrator file. The result was spreads that were very deliberate and impactful. Each one could have stood on its own in poster format.