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Yara Kono
Brazil
Yara Kono is a Brazilian illustrator who lives in Portugal and is part of the Planeta Tangerina team. She received an Honourable Mention at the first Compostela International Prize for Picture Books and a Special Mention for ‘A Ilha’ (written by João Gomes de Abreu) in the Opera Prima Category at the 2013 Bologna Ragazzi Awards.
In this post, Yara talks about her working process and shares some wonderful illustrations from ‘ABZZZZ...’. This highly original alphabet book was written by Isabel Minhós Martins and is the most recent picturebook to be published by Planeta Tangerina.
Yara: Having a new text to illustrate is always a challenge, and I always try to take things a little further. The exploitation of the book as an object, the selection of the format, the most appropriate font, the colour palette, the illustration technique and the graphical composition... These are some of the essential issues at play when I illustrate a book.
‘ABZZZZ...’ had two specific challenges for me: the page composition and the colour palette. I selected a palette of brighter colours which I wasn't used to working with at all. Really, these are colours which are far too vibrant for a book about sleep.
The idea was to juxtapose the brighter colours with black and also with some neutral shades – and that I'd try to simplify the illustrations as much as possible. This happened because, unlike most of the books I've illustrated in the past, I couldn't create double-page illustrations for this one. As it's an alphabet book, I had to create each page separately.
Since each page represents a single letter of the alphabet, each two pages of a spread needed to illustrate distinct and sometimes quite unique themes. It was therefore very challenging for me to create harmony across the spreads.
To begin with, there were pages with a lot of noise which were very rich in patterns and details... and I gradually realised that when you put the pages side by side, they didn't look good. So I simplified them and cleaned them up until I arrived at an end result which I was happy with.
Illustrations © Yara Kono / Planeta Tangerina. Post translated by Gengo and edited by dPICTUS.
ABZZZZ...
Isabel Minhós Martins & Yara Kono
Planeta Tangerina, Portugal, 2014
There are people who resist sleep with all their strength. And for obvious reasons: Being awake is so good!
But it has been proven by science that nobody lives without sleep. So we created this ABC of sleep – a book that will make us fall asleep before the alphabet ends.
An ABC so powerful that even the book title fell asleep...
