Illustrator Elena Odriozola At CBI10

May 17, 2010 by Jennifer Farley    1 Comment     Posted under: Blog, Illustration

I attended the Children’s Books Ireland conference at the weekend which was chock a block with inspiration and interesting speakers from the world of children’s literature and picture book illustration. I’m about 65% (past the middle hump anyway) of writing and illustrating a picture book so it was great to hear other people talk about their experiences. So in yet another post subtitled “I wish I could do this” I wanted to show some images from Spanish Illustrator Elena Odriozola

I first saw her work in the lovely book “The Opposite” a couple of years ago and was struck by how different and how beautiful her drawings were.

During her talk, Elena spoke about her needs or what she likes when she’s illustrating. These included:

• I need the size of my characters to stay the same throughout the story
• I need image and text to be as one – as long as the design allows it the image and text are one.
• I need to do the illustration life-size – if a book is 20×20cm I draw in that size but my next work is working in vignettes and will need to be made bigger.
• I need the image to spread over 2 pages – it has more to with continuity and one of my obsessions.

Here’s some images, mostly from The Opposite.

You can see more of Elena’s work at Pencil (and lot’s of other amazing artists too).

You can read much more about the Children’s Books Ireland Conference on David Maybury’s Blog.

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!