2020-08-28

Baba Jaga

 all images in this post © La Cicala editore 2020

Samples from the illustrations I made for the book Baba Jaga by Fiorella Colombo, published by La Cicala editore. This time I used another techique I always loved: ink pen on paper.

The story is a revisiting of traditional east-european folk tale Vassilissa the Beautiful, in which appears the terrible and enigmatic witch Baba Jaga. For this project I was in charge of all the graphic design of the book, besides the illustrations, and together with the author we decided to compose the whole book around the concept of light and darkness (known and unknown), visualized by an alternation of white and black pages. I designed also a series of decorative vegetable friezes to frame the illustrations and the text pages. These branches flourishes as the story progresses, to symbolize the growth of the protagonist, the girl Vassilissa. The addition of a third colour, red, was necessary to give visual prominence to the third force symbolized in the original story by the red knight, servant of the witch. The red color is a digital addition to scanned drawings.

No comments: