Once Upon A Time In Lari

Upon my recent travels to Tuscany, Italy, I visited a small town called Lari. Lari is known for its circle center that circles round a medieval castle. You can make your way to the top and venture inside to look around. It's in quite impressive condition and being a fan of the medieval period I enjoyed the visit. Inside the tourist shop were these two books that I straight away wanted to buy because of the colours and illustrations. The artist is Tommaso Levente Tani.

 They are fun interactive picture books that appeal to multiple ages. The reason I wanted these so much is because it's an aim of mine to produce a picture book similar to these that have historical information. The set of two consists of one history book explaining the history of Lari and how the castle and town grew over the years. The other book is a fold out activity booklet which has small puzzles and games to do.

 I also got drawn to these books because of the focus on Heraldry they both have, even down to designing and meanings. I previously did a project on Heraldry and find the topic extremely interesting.

 The pages are beautiful and colourful, the translation from Italy is a little bit poor and some of the sentences don't quite make sense but it's still a lovely book to add to my collection. The illustrations are vector based with quite a simplistic style, the characters have a "copy and paste" feel but it works really well. I think these are lovely little books with lots of information displayed in a very attractive way!

Artists I like #8

Browsing DeviantArt and I saw this book that had been crafted into a sort of treasure chest. It just looks really pretty and almost like a collectable. It is very delicate and by the appearance has a lot of tiny hand made hard back books or scrolls. It relates to my current project because it could be an artist book. It would also be quite a unique take as its more of an object based piece. 

Images have since been deleted from Deviantart

My Collections - Professional Practice

So a side project that runs through the year is "Professional Practice", looking into possible careers, artists, exhibitions and all things arty that will develop our professional skills. One assignment was to look at eh V&A collection and then create our own collection. I thought I'd do a doodle of me, in my room, surrounded by my collection. The collection is supposed to be able to identify us as a person. I'm sure mine does.