Marie Of Bruyers: A Children's Book Illustration

This is a children's book illustration project. This book was commissioned for the Bruyers Museum to help educate visitors on their story and the liberation of their village during WW2. This project was a multi lingual challenge as I had to work in both French and English and also needed a lot of sensitivity. We needed to feel what people had gone through during the war. All the artwork was painted using Adobe Photoshop and laid out in Indesign. It took about 8 weeks to complete and is now on sale. I worked as a full service illustrator and layout artist. I was given free reign with the art direction and encouraged to bring as much of the real village into the book as possible. This book was a privilege to work on.

Marie of Bruyeres: A Historical Children's Book Illustration
Marie of Bruyers is one of the most interesting projects I have worked on. The story is about a village in France that was liberated during WW2 but a company of Japanese American soldiers. This book was commission to remember their sacrifice and is on sale in the museum of Bruyers. This project needed to show the sadness of the time but also end on the hope of the future. An additional challenge for this was that the author wanted the text in both English and French for every spread. This meant that we needed to design the full bleed artwork with lots of space to accommodate the text. I am super proud of the final product and the tribute that it pays. 
Rough Sketch to Finished artwork. Leaving lots of room for the text. 
The story was focused around the main character Marie and her family farm. Here you can see the design development process of the characters. My initial sketches were too bright and primary for the nature of the story so working with the author we dialed it back to something darker and more rugged. We wanted it to feel like the family had been through a lot.
Another core element of the project was the development of the farm house. This was essentially an additional character for the story and through the book you can see it become more and more dilapidated as more of their resources were requisitioned by the invaders and their home fell further into disrepair. 
This is one of my favourite spreads of the story as it is the most hopeful where you have one of the Japanese American soldiers sharing his chocolate ration with Marie and the joy the family feel as they know that they have their freedom back.
↑Back to Top