Student Creative Jasmine Baker: Welcome back!

We’re about halfway there with the project, and I’ve been busy conjuring lots of colourful things in the last few weeks, which I’m super excited to share with you!

To begin with, I visited the MoDiP Museum to view some of the wonders I’d found peering through the online gallery and spent a sunny afternoon creating sketches and illustrations to fuel inspiration for my picture book.

Whether or not my primary motivation to visit was driven by a desire to play with the objects in question, well, we won’t talk about that..

But here’s a photograph of some of the wonderful objects I had free rein over for a few hours!

Photograph from my first visit to MoDiP
Image credit: Jasmine Baker

In my first post, I set myself three questions to help spark some ideas, and you may be curious as to the answers I found myself with. Well, here they are!

• What would a child’s perception of plastic be? Bright, colourful, fun
  
  
• What would they think it’s purpose serves? The imagination
  
  
• To a child, is plastic inherently positive or negative? Positive

At surface value, I decided that children would be likely to find plastic; positive, bright, colourful & fun, with its purpose being to serve their imagination. As some of their initial, first encounters with plastic would be toys.

I should know, I have an adorable 12-month-old niece and it’s an understatement to say that she spends half her life atop a mountain of toys, when she isn’t busy launching them across the room in her own rendition of ‘fetch’, of course.

So, naturally, the themes I decided to tinker with are toys, colour, and the imagination, and to see where this would lead me. I started creating all sorts of doodles and let my own imagination roam wild. Here are some of my favourites!

Treasures (left) and Daydreamer (right) - front covers

Animals - page spread

Play - illustration

Toys - decorative page spread

Anyone feeling a tad nostalgic yet? Because I now wholeheartedly miss my Etch-A-Sketch and Tamagotchi. But like most retro toys, it is now upsettingly expensive to relive your childhood..

Anyway, next was to create some story boards, in order to organise the creative chaos - Here are a couple of outlines of what the narrative could look like, but things are still subject to change and take shape in new ways over the following weeks!

Treasures (left) and Daydreamer (right) - storyboard

Both of the narrative concepts I’ve conjured, ‘Treasures’ and ‘Daydreamer’, are about the adventures that children have, fuelled by their favourite toys. The concept for ‘Daydreamer’ makes me particularly excited because it plays with the border between pages, as the gutter of the page acts as a barrier between reality and the imagination. It’s also my idea to purposefully use colour to distinguish between the different worlds, with reality being black and white, and the dream world being filled to the brim with bright saturated colours.

That’s all I have for now. I will see you for the final update and conclusion to my MoDiP project next time!

Jasmine Baker