Book Redesign / Illustration
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As a final senior project for my Print and Publications class at the University of Michigan (Through STAMPS School of Art and Design) we were prompted with a book to redesign with our own layout and illustration. I chose the 1968 short story "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a fantasy tale originally written in Spanish and translated to English. Having previously read his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was enamored by his whimsical, textured writing style and thought his work was perfect to work with for the project.
I used a charcoal- like Procreate brush and masking to create a combination of both a raw, grainy texture with a clean cut. I wanted to accomplish a style that looked dismal and curious like the writing, but had a modern satisfying touch to it.
Book design published April 2023 as a project for a University of Michigan STAMPS School of Art and Design Print Publications Class, created with Procreate and InDesign
Book Flip Through
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As the first phase of the book redesign, I broke the story up into 16 pages with specific visuals to correspond with an estimate of the story pacing. Throughout the creative process there was a lot of back and fourth between the visuals and wording layout in order to finalize the pages. My goal for the illustrations was to visually accentuate certain parts of the story one might miss or read over, bringing life to the details that make the tale interesting. I chose to leave page 10 black with the scripted quote,
"The only supernatural quality he held was patience",
as the centerpiece of the page in order to bring attention to the words and visually give the reader room to breathe. I wanted the illustrations to be an ebb and flow of "clean chaos" paired with Gabriel's raw and whimsical tale.
Select Pages from A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings book redesign / illustration