Nov 2, 2017

ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES - Elena Passarello

For this beautiful little book of sixteen essays, each investigating a different famous animal named and immortalised by humans, we commissioned Clare Lewis to illustrate each chapter page. Within its pages we see the starling that inspired Mozart with its song, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet, and Jumbo the elephant (and how they tried to electrocute him). Modelled loosely on a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, provocative essays traverse history, myth, science and more.

Clare also reproduced many of the characters for the jacket design, adding colour to her strong, bold linoprint illustrations. We asked Clare about her feelings on this, her first book illustration commission:

“Black and white illustrations were not something I’d previously worked on or explored before so I was initially daunted by the concept – but excited nonetheless! To create depth and an environment without colour I found it best to create a layered effect, reaching into the distance around the animal, with varying shades of grey. All of the animals were hand-carved into lino to create a print, which was then scanned and then used to digitally create the entire page. I lean towards natural content when creating my own work so I found that these illustrations began to flow quite quickly and I’m overjoyed to see my first book artworks published!”

You can see more of Clare’s work on her website and instagram.

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