Windows into Illustration: Mariajo Ilustrajo

Mariajo Ilustrajo won the Klaus Flugge Prize for most exciting newcomer to picture book illustration with her book Flooded. Flooded also won the English Association Book Award and the UKLA Book Award. Her next book Lost is currently on the shortlist for the Carnegie Medal for Illustration.  Here she talks about the creative process that led to her new book, I Hate Love Books, another fresh, beautifully drawn story, full of playfulness.

I Hate Love Books is my third book as an author / illustrator. I wrote the first two (Flooded and Lost) during my Masters in Children’s Books Illustration at Anglia Ruskin, with a lot of feedback from tutors and colleagues. However, with this last one I flew solo, with the support of my publisher, of course, but it felt slightly terrifying being alone out there.

I feel this book is a bit of a mix between Flooded and Lost, technique wise, as I created the ‘real’ world in a similar technique to Flooded, with acrylic ink (wet and dry strokes) and a very limited colour palette with accent colours to highlight what I wanted to.

When the protagonist jumps into her imagination the pages become colourful like in Lost and I think this worked very well as you can easily recognise her in the real-world vs inside her imagination.

The idea of the book was born from a batch of single images I created of a girl reading as an experimentation with Panpastels and acrylic ink. I loved the contrast of the fluffy texture I created for her hair with the Panpastel against the dry and sharp lines of the acrylic ink applied with the dip pen.

The publisher and I thought it was quite an interesting character, so I had to give her a story and everything went from there.

As with my previous books which also grew from a one-off image, I started doing some sketches and trying to figure out what the story was about. Soon enough, during the development process, I decided that the girl was going to jump into her imagination and some sort of jungle scene should appear in the book. I was very excited about this jungle scene! Usually there is a page or two in the story that I get very excited about and this is the one that got me to experiment with the artwork initially.

Usually, I have an idea of how I would like the book to look, but it’s not until I start working that I know just how it will look. In this case I was looking to play with green. I know it might sound weird but there is very little green in my illustrations, and I wanted to experiment with that. I started to play with Panpastel backgrounds and leaves with acrylic gouache, inks and colour pencils. Always adding a bit of fluorescent pink ink to check how it would work with the neon Pantone once we printed it.

I enjoyed playing with the texture of the dry brushes and on some occasions painting some of the leaves with my fingers! I must say I was very pleased to introduce some greens to my colour repertoire!

I think I am pretty happy with this page as I think it’s a cool page turn from the previous muted colours pages.

I Hate Love Books is published by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, ‎ 978-0711277991, £12.99 hbk.