Designing the Cast
Every character began with research: mood boards, silhouette studies and personality mapping, resolved into final sheets with colour keys, expressions and poses.
Illustration · MA Final Project
Illustrated in Procreate and Photoshop with varied textures for a distinctive look. Click through the spreads the way the story unfolds.
Every character began with research: mood boards, silhouette studies and personality mapping, resolved into final sheets with colour keys, expressions and poses.
The Book
The Kind Mage is my MA final project: a gateway dark fantasy pop-up book incorporating a simple find the missing pieces puzzle. It follows the story of a kind mage as he travels the lands of the Suvarna Kingdom, collecting dismembered body parts to exorcise a spirit at the request of the King. The story embraces themes of willingness to help, healing, and the necessity of sometimes asking for help, and how that is alright.
It is a perfect journey for early picture book readers transitioning to more complex and expressive phonetics. The book includes a map with names derived from the classical language of Sanskrit, providing an opportunity to interact with words and multicultural composite pronunciations. The rich imagery, a nod to ancient South Indian cultural influences, provides a refreshing visual feast that introduces historical and cultural nuances, while bits of paper engineering bring a sense of tangible interaction and fun.
I developed the story together with Saumya Somasekharan, and created the characters, the world and the illustrated spreads. Saumya's paper engineering brought the book to life as a demo pop-up, exhibited at Arts University Bournemouth.
The Poem
In the moonlit castle, a meek king was vexed,
For a ghost sought aid, a hex to perplex.
The kind mage arrives with magic untold,
To gather the ghostly parts, a curse meant to unfold.
In the royal gardens, hidden among the bushes with eerie eyes,
Lay the ghost's head. Oh! What a strange surprise!
Through the forest with rangy arms, trees in disguise,
The mage retrieved a pair of hands under Mother Nature's guise.
In a pond tucked away with jumping frogs and hidden loot,
The mage salvages the legs, almost completing this peculiar pursuit.
By the river's edge remain rocks resembling one's core,
The mage pulls out the torso towards the end of this lore.
With great magic and care, the mage mended the ghost anew,
And with gratitude, the ghostly spirit bid adieu.
A poem by Kaynat Zehra & Saumya Somasekharan