Rethinking Pinocchio - A series of mixed-media book illustrations

A personal project in response to a week long online art challenge.

This 7 day book challenge took lines from the original Pinocchio book, offering them up to artists online to use as a prompt for new art. The guidance was to forget any pre-conceived ideas about Pinocchio.

I was inspired by the idea of Pinocchio being made of wood, so used a tree silhouette and a wooden texture for his form. Other characters were made of textures that either connected to Pinocchio (the puppets were foliage), or to their own purpose (the doctors being made of tablets and medical items).

I created these pages digitally, using a mix of my own art work, textures and found images, mixed in Procreate and typeset in Adobe illustrator. Scroll down for a process timelapse video.

It was a wild and stormy night.

Pinocchio had a great fear of thunder but hunger was stronger than fear, he therefore made a rush to the village.

The embraces that Pinocchio received from the excited actors and actresses (all puppets( of the puppet company beat description.

The doctors came immediately one after the other: namely a crow, an owl and a talking cricket.

Pinocchio swam and swam but to his surprise he found himself enclosed in a great net, together with a swarm of fish of every size and shape, who were flapping and struggling like so many desperate souls.