Folio Society – Rebecca Bagley Illustration

As the Folio Society continues to pump out books so beautiful I dribble a little bit, in their honor I decided to knock out a few pieces in line with their yearly competition (previous entry seen here).

Three illustrations and a book jacket design for their next publication; and this year the book is a collection of short, Victorian ghost stories, all with varying themes and settings but linked together by a whole lotta scary.

So here’s what I got. Not so traditional but hopefully still dark and tingly making!

The Treasure of Thomas Abbot by M.R James

The Upper Berth by F Marion Crawford

The Tale of the Empty House by E F Benson

And the jacket design. This had to be simple with limited colours to be printed onto cloth. Instructions also dictated that there should be no information on the cover itself, but space for the logo and anthology title on the spine.

Okay so it hasn’t won, but it was a nice project to work on, and excellent portfolio builder and most importantly, gave me an great excuse to curl up under a blanket get involved in some classic creepies!

If you’ve had your ear to the ground in the world of illustration and whatnot, you may have heard that the Folio Society & House of Illustration have recently launched their 2014 competition to illustrate a classic novel. This year’s addition to their, ever growing archive of mouth-wateringly stunning books, is Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness.

And with a subject matter that rich, who the hell am I to say no?

So here was my entries of 3, evenly spaced illustrations to accompany the text and a graphically simple jacket design.

"Two women, one fat, the other slim sat on straw bottomed chairs, knitting black wool." — “Two women, one fat, the other slim sat on straw bottomed chairs, knitting black wool.”

"What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her-- and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere..." — “What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines
blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving,
and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her–
and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere…”

"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad." — “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked
within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.”

So there we have it! It was a stunning project to work with, the text is truly deep and rich and it was a genuine challenge to provide works that didn’t sell it short. In the end, I decided to let the words do their job with the vast majority of the description and allow the imagery to focus more on communicating the themes of the scene. It’s my belief that images should, really offer something additional to the text, rather than simply supporting it.

I Can’t wait to see the winning design, I’m sure it’s going to be something quite special!

Rebecca Bagley Illustration

Tag: Folio Society

House Of Illustration and Folio Society: A collection of Ghost Stories!

A Dark Heart and a Whole lot of Mess

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