Final blog post from MoDiP’s Student Creative, Jasmine Baker

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the third and final blog post and conclusion to my time with MoDiP as one of the ‘Student creatives’ for 2021-2022. In the last 21 weeks, I have had the chance to orchestrate my own project, one that reflects both my own practice as an illustrator as well as MoDiP’s expansive collection of objects.

I chose to create a wordless picture book, one that was based within the theme of ‘Children’s toys’, which led me down a pathway full of bright bold colours, nostalgia, and the concept of imagination. Children are some of the most naturally fluent daydreamers, and toys often act as a catalyst to spark their imagination, they can create stories, ideas, and whole worlds from a single object. This is what I decided I would represent within my picture book, the world of the daydreamer!

So, without further ado, here are a selection of pages from my finished project! You can see the whole book on display now, in the cases outside the museum, until 23rd May 2022.

I am so pleased to have had the chance to create this project. I was able to experiment with the physicality of the book itself by exploring how the page boarder could be used as an additional story-telling element. I kept the illustrations as close to the original sketches as possible to keep things feeling that little bit more alive and child-like, and I used the most vibrant of colours to create a distinction between the dream world and the real world. I am so happy with how it looks, and to finally hold the physical printed book feels surreal after months viewing it on the screen of my iPad.

This project also offered me the space to be able to create something that is outside of how I usually work, and because of that it has been invaluable in teaching me that it is okay to make something that is not perfectly refined, detailed, and conclusive. It was so much fun to have the time to play, explore, experiment, and simply enjoy the process!

To summarise, it has simply been a really wonderful experience.

Thank you so much to the amazing team at MoDiP who work tirelessly to collect, conserve and curate a myriad of so many compelling objects, and who believed in both me and my project enough to select me as one of the student creatives this year. I hope everyone else found following along with this project over the past few months as much fun as I had creating it!

Thank you for reading,

Farewell for now!

Jasmine