Zodiacville Runners Illustration

Press Kit

Unique Properties

This project is an experimental mixture of traditional Korean 'minhwa' attributes, fable narratives passed from mouth to mouth, and illustrator's own digital pointillism painting styles. Accordingly, folkish episodes of zodiacville animals are based on the humorous and joyful sentiment of the festival. Furthermore, numerous dilute dots were blended layer by layer, inspired by the oriental back-painting technique.

Dimensions & Packaging

260mm X 260mm, Rounding post-processing to prevent children from cutting their hands on a book

Tags

Illustration, Fairy Tale, Pointillism, Zodiac

Production Technology

Layering hard-type dots one by one, the illustrator materialized the pointillism in a digital drawing environment.

Design Challenge

There were concerns that humorous expressions could convey distorted visual messages to growing children, as this book was planned to be used in educational sites. Therefore, the contents were continuously consulted by professional elementary teachers and volunteers from youth institutions. Accordingly, the illustrations have undergone modifications to prevent expressing certain races or minority classes in negative stereotypes.

Project Duration

The duration of the project is from October 2018 to February 2019. The project was mainly carried out in South Korea. Later, other countries where the books are planned to be distributed are Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine.

Operation Flow

The book is divided into Part1 for children and Part 2 for educators. Educators organize classes by referring to learning guides and supplementary materials in Part2, helping children understand contents in Part1. Educators use illustrations and Russian hint texts to encourage children to learn Korean and Korean culture naturally. Furthermore, children infer the situation with illustrations and learn in-depth on what the yellow-highlighted keywords mean in Korean.

Research

The project is based on anatomical research to represent detailed animal characters that fit the cognitive ability of shapes of teenage children. In advance, the actual bones and muscle structures of the animals in the book were analyzed in detail. After that, the silhouettes were organically simplified and the deformation technique was applied to give character traits.

Inspiration

This is a children's fairy tale about Zodiacville's animals participated in the running festival hosted by the Dragon King. The illustrator and writer enriched episodes with ideas from several workshops in the plot conception stage. For example, a four-character idiom, "Monkeys and dogs don't get along well", was naturally included in the episode.

Image Credits

Juyeon Park, 2019

Colors of Zodiacville Runners Illustration