The Child Ballads is the colloquial name given to a collection of 305 ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child and originally published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
These ballads have inspired musicians to create music, writers like Terry Pratchett to create stories but the illustrative possibilities of these ballads has not been as widely explored as collections like the Aesop fables or Grimm's fairy tales.
Thus I wanted to create work illustrating the Child Ballads.
Thus I wanted to create work illustrating the Child Ballads.
Artist Influence
Jill Calder
Jill Calder's use of layering analogue marks to create textured scenes and characters was of particular influence for the illustrations of the Child Ballads. Her use of unnatural colours and painterly marks in her newest illustrated book Coorie Doon was also very influential.
Jill Calder layers foliage to populate pages and create depth by placing plants in the foreground, this was a technique I repeated within my book pages. 
Robert the Bruce children's book. Calder often uses a limited colour palate within her pages, I was influenced by this when creating my pages.
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A spread from her latest children's book, Coorie Doon which uses abstract analogue marks to suggest foliage. This technique is used when creating pages for The Illustrated Child Ballads.
Later on in the page making process I decide to create my own titles by hand. Jill Calder was influential for this as she is well known for creating her own lettering and this was seen by myself clearly in her Picture Atlas.
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Sara Ogilvie
Sara Ogilvie's work is another artist that creates work that is both digital and analogue. Characters and objects in her books tend to be analogue line art that has digital colouring underneath and then texture masked on top of the colour. This is a technique that I used within my work. Dave, the character to the left, has been coloured digitally and then had a painted texture layered on top.
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Sneaky pictures taken at the charity shop
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Research into ballad-like books This book of Scottish folk songs is more music heavy than illustration. I decided to treat my book of 'ballads' more like a book of poems so that the emphasis is on the illustration.
Although some of the child ballads do have music associated with them, most of these tunes are artists interpretations as the original music has been lost to time. However I did listen to these interpretations when creating the book pages. Steeleye Span's interpretation of Allison Gross was my favorite of the bunch. 
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Choosing the poems
Using online sources such as The Child Ballads Index as well as English and Scottish popular ballads; : Child, Francis James, 1825-1896 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive I read through ballads to pick out a collection which I would illustrate.
I used List of the Child Ballads - Wikipedia to see the synopsis of the ballads, then I would read them on the sources above to see if the poem was appropriate.
For a ballad to be chosen I wanted ballads that were:
I used List of the Child Ballads - Wikipedia to see the synopsis of the ballads, then I would read them on the sources above to see if the poem was appropriate.
For a ballad to be chosen I wanted ballads that were:
- Accessible language for modern audiences. Scots was acceptable and even sought after, but far too complicated words meant the ballad wouldn't be a fit choice. I intended to have a glossary at the end of the book but having to explain every word wouldn't work. I wanted ballads that even if you didn't know every word you could still understand the ballads story first reading.
- Appropriate themes for children. Some of the ballads deal with vicious themes such as suicide, rape and child death, such subjects I felt wouldn't be appropriate. Another reoccurring theme was sexism, women being punished for not accommodating men thus I made it a goal to choose ballads which are told from female perspectives and feature strong women.
- An impactful moral. I wanted to choose ballads that had a story that would teach the reader.
- Short. Some Child ballads are exceptionally long, which wouldn't be digestible for children and would mean one story for many pages to accommodate. Thus, short ballads were searched for in my hunt for the perfect set of ballads.
- A good mix. Many child ballads center love stories or are the same story but told in a slightly different way ( For example unquiet grave is a gender swapped version of Sweet William's Ghost). So I sought out stories that felt original. Some of the exact same ballads have multiple versions using slightly different words or have different endings. When choosing the final ballads I read the different iterations and chose the one I felt fit.
Hunting down the right ballads.To the right are bookmarked ballads to that I saved to read.
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One particular ballad that made it quite far in the weeding out stage was The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry - Wikipedia
This ballad was printed out and I began decoding the language. I was excited to illustrate it because of its inclusion of the selkie. However, when looking up some of the language of the ballad and reading up on other people's reading of the ballad. It was clear the ballad would not be appropriate as it's suggested that the woman of the ballad has been impregnated without consent. Thus this ballad was axed from the batch. The chosen ballads for this children's book collection are:
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Vernon Hill's illustration
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The Child Ballads
Below are pages documenting the creation of the 32 page Child Ballad Children's book. Covering 10 different Child ballads.
Putting the book together
Making an layout in photoshop to map out the quiet area, the bleed and the gutter.
Originally I had planned to create a paperback book. However taking influence from medieval manuscripts and Jill Calder's illustrated Atlas I decided the book would be hardback instead.
To the left are the specifications for the hardcover book. I decided to go with 150gsm as this is what is popular for art book and I thought this would give importance to the illustrations of the book. |
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I moved these thumbnails around to decide the order of the pages. I wanted the order to aid in the storytelling.
For example I wanted the unquiet grave to be after a happy ending and romance ballad, Brown Robin, this was to act as a juxtaposition to the sad romance of the unquiet grave.
The final pages
I used this space on my website to keep track of what was still unfinished by changing out the thumbnails of the pages for updated progress images. Now the images below are of the final book pages.
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The pages above were sent off to mixam to be printed off as the book. Below is an interactive preview of the book created by mixam.
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Designing a business card
I wanted to reuse assets from the child's ballad as this is in essence my portfolio. Thus my card should reflect this work.
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The below designs are the two sides of my business card, taking assets from the first Allison Gross page and the wee wee man from the child ballad's front cover.
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I also created stickers using assets from the child ballads
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The ones above are on a much better paper than the stickers to the left. The ones on the left have washed out colours and so the ones that I will be selling are the ones above.
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