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Book of bugs
As illustration is becoming more and more prominent within my design process and outcomes, I felt that I should set myself a task to improve my drawing skills.
I decided that I would do an illustration a day for month, and obviously carry on if I could. This was initially just a way to improve my skills and get as much practice as I could around completing briefs. However on my second night of completing an illustration I suddenly had the thought of making the illustration part of a series, so they weren't random, and then I could create an editorial brief of it, and create a book of the series of illustrations.
The second illustration I did was of a beetle, and the style of design I created it with I really liked, and so I felt I doing a series of insects would work really nicely and create some unusual and exciting illustrative work.
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Finding bugs:
Obviously I needed to find a reasonable number of insects to illustrate as I wanted the insects to be real and accurate to their existing appearance. I went online to find an alphabetic list of insects and went through them, looking them up and deciding which ones I wanted to illustrate.
I decided due to phobias I would leave out spiders and worms. So it would be a collection of beetles, flies and butterflies. I had to think in terms of numbers how it would work with a publication so I needed a number that could end up as a multiple of four. I ended up with 58 bugs I wanted to illustrate.
Drawing the bugs:
It was then a matter of drawings all the bugs. I wanted the final designs to be very clean around the edges. So I decided that I would create outlines of each insect on illustrator and print it off, then hand draw the designs inside. This also allowed each bug to be symmetrical in terms of outline, with a free hand pattern inside.
Orginally I set myself to do around four a day as I didn't want this to be over a long period of time, however I ended up getting impatient and did all 58 within 6 days.
These were the final illustrations, in alphabetic order.
To make sure the focus remained on the illustrations all I included in the layout was the name and latin name of the insect and the page number. All centred in a very simple format.
It was then just a matter of sending it to blurb and waiting for them to post me the final product. I decided to send it to blurb rather than bind it myself as this project was mainly for the purpose of developing my illustration skills, so I didn't want to then spend a lot of time making them into a book. This way I could just send it off and wouldn't have to worry about other design aspects.
The final book_
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