Visual Book Inspiration

Objective:

For my visual book, I want to create an illustration of traditional myth / fairy tale. Hence, I researched for some illustrated book on mythology/folk lore. Below is some interesting material that I found.

Cover and Catalog

Cover page sets the tone and style for the rest of the book. We can expect very similar arts style/illustrations of similar creatures. i.e. Gods will tend to look like the man in purple toga at the top left corner.

The is a content page of a different book (Grimm’s fairy tales). From the art style, we could easily tell that it’s not Greek Myths because of the color scheme as well as the elements of flowers.

Consistent Style

Below is an example of a traditional Japanese folk story. The style of the visual is very consistent — large graphic illustration with interweaving textual contents.

Another example of a Chinese folk lore with consistent structure across all pages and unique art style. The graphic illustrations are heavily influenced by traditional Chinese ink painting. The background color for text also matches the color of old yellow paper, rendering a unifying feeling.

Illustrations from a book about Egyptian mythology. We can see the consistency in those pages because of the frame and the stars. The text to graphic ratio is also maintained (more text than illustration).