Monday 6 November 2017

Typewronger Books commission




This was a commission for Typewronger Books, a new bookshop that opened in Edinburgh yesterday and is currently operating out of the police box on Leith Walk (Croall Place).  I was asked to produce two illustrations for a double-sided bookmark, which will also work as a business card for the shop.

Even though I was given barely any time to create the image and the design, I'm happy with the way that it turned out.  Here are a couple of pictures of the finished piece and also a picture from the opening yesterday too -





Typewronger Books is open every Sunday on Leith Walk in Edinburgh from 11 until 6pm!  

For more information on Typewronger Books please visit their website at www.typewronger.com or their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/typewronger

Saturday 4 November 2017

Inktober 2017


Last month I took part in Inktober, an annual challenge where participants must produce one ink drawing a day and share it on social media with the hashtag #inktober.  Unfortunately I couldn't upload new work every day of the month, but it was a great exercise to try.  I'd definitely recommend it to anyone with a project in the wings that you need an incentive to work on.  

I used the challenge to develop some thumbnails I'd already been producing for a project which has been in the pipeline for a long time.  Below and above are some examples of this - hopefully I'll have time in the new year to work on these and develop them more!

More images can be found on my Instagram account at www.instagram.com/joannakrobson










Saturday 30 September 2017

New book art coming soon

A few pictures of work in progress for a new artist's book, inspired by a famous party held at the American embassy in Moscow and the literary classic it helped to inspire...




Tuesday 29 August 2017

The University on the Hill


A recent commission for Glasgow University has just been finished!

Above and below are photos from the project, which include a lasercut book and a series of enlarged laser-cut pieces based on some pages from the book.

The brief required numerous buildings from Glasgow Uni's Gilmorehill campus to be incorporated in to the design of the book, hence the diverse range of building styles throughout:





Tuesday 6 June 2017

Work in progress

This is a current work in progress which was on my table at Edinburgh Fruitmarket's Artists book market earlier on this year.

It's still unfinished, as I've been busy editioning lots of other work recently.  Either the etching plate may get aquatinted to give it more depth, or the whole thing will need to get re-designed.  While I'm trying to decide what would be best for this piece, I thought I'd share a few photos of it here for now...





Wednesday 19 April 2017

Nylmah excerpt - available to buy online now


Occasionally the laser cutter messes up while it's cutting and I'm unable to use whole pieces for books. Here's an example of a small area of a damaged Nylmah that I managed to save - it encapsulates the story well and it also works as a stand alone piece.

This is a unique, one-off piece and is currently available on my online shop at http://joannarobsonillustration.bigcartel.com/product/nylmah-exclusive-excerpt-piece

Update - this item has now sold!




Monday 3 April 2017

Jancia ze Lwowa

Jancia ze Lwowa, or Jancia from Lwow, tells the true story of a family growing up in Lwow during the second world war.  The colour illustrations were commissioned by a colleague who wrote the story and published it herself earlier on this year.

I will post more images from this project later, but for now it's great to finally be able to share these images on my blog!








Monday 6 March 2017

A walk through A Midsummer Night's Dream

For those who didn't get to see the largest concertina book I've ever created at McNaughtan's Bookshop and Gallery in Edinburgh last summer, here's a short one minute video of it from beginning to end:


A higher resolution of this video is available at https://vimeo.com/202385480.

Only seven copies of this book will be made (eight including the display copy featured in this video).

Each copy in the edition is priced at £1,950.

There are just five copies are currently available.  If you are interested in purchasing one of them, or would like to ask any questions about it, please contact me through http://joannarobsonillustration.bigcartel.com/contact

I hope you enjoy this short video and thank you for looking!

Thursday 23 February 2017

Etching collage

Below are some photos from an experiment I did with a couple of unsellable etchings I had to remove from an edition.  Taking a scalpel to my etchings always feels unusually cathartic, though I'm still not sure why.  Perhaps the etching process can remove the spontaneity of image making, which chopping up helps to restore.








Friday 27 January 2017

Q&A

About a week ago, an illustration student contacted me with some questions about my laser cut book Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Unfortunately I get mailer daemons ('mailbox unavailable') whenever I reply to her email, so instead I'm going to include the questions with my answers here on this blog.  Hopefully she'll find them here and they'll be of some use!

I was just wondering if there was a reasoning for the book being a concertina form? 

I think I wanted something that could be as small and compact as a book, and something that could fold out in to a small landscape as well.  I thought that the setting of this story is something that should somehow be incorporated in to how the book looks too.  The concertina format worked well for that.


What have you found this brought to sequence? 

It lets me include the landscape in a way that's more physical than a regular book that's stitched together at the spine, and I really like that dimension to it.  It lets you include all kinds of other things.  Though having said that, the concertina format can also be quite limiting.  Hopefully it makes me a better editor in deciding what to include and what to leave out.  You can't include everything in a story, but it does allow you to accentuate other little details.


And finally, does the form effect how the sequence is read?

I sort of hope that it gets read left to right like a regular book, but it doesn't always happen!  Some people start looking at the book in the middle pages and work their way backwards in the book.  I also designed some of the pages in it so that it could be read like a comic as well, so you'd start by looking at the top left of each page and work your way to the bottom right corner.