Last term my lecturer received an invitation for the student to participate in a competition to illustrate a children book. The host for this competition is Chou Sing Chu Foundation, a non-profit organisation who aims to spark the Chinese culture, education and language in Singapore.
I emailed them and got immediate reply. They gave me the story in mandarin, which I needed to translate before I started working with the illustrations.
One of the requirement for this project is to understand Chinese language. Although I've known or learn Chinese language (through many additional courses and school curriculum in Junior and High school), I still find it hard. I believe it was because I didn't get enough exposure to the Chinese culture. The thing with language is that you have to practice it everyday, unless whatever you have learned will not stay in your brain!
I live in Indonesia and not everyone speak mandarin (and I am proud of our unity in diversity).
Thankfully, I have a friend who used to study in China and she was willing to help me. I hope that if I ever get the chance to work on this project, this project will be one of those 'exposure' that I needed to slowly build up my mandarin skills.
At first, I thought of doing a 'sketch' style. I know it will takes more time to build up, but that's just what I felt like doing at that time. However, my laptop suddenly broke down and by the time it got back to me from the service centre, I didn't have much time left. So I went on with digital illustration to save more time and meet the deadline.
The drawings I did the first draft.
The digital version was created using both adobe illustrator and photoshop. I made vector illustration as the base, and brush up the rest with photoshop.
Based on the requirement, they want each participant to make 5 pages of illustrations.
The colour that I picked is very subtle. I know that children illustrations usually have bright and fun colours, but this time, somehow I feel like celebrating the Chinese literature; which, often I found Chinese Literature very poetic.
Fortunately, despite of the time limitation, I managed to submit the artworks on time. After 2 weeks, I received an email about the announcement they made in their website. I was very happy to actually see my name in the selected illustrators' list :))
They said that they will contact me for the upcoming collaboration soon. I can't wait and very excited :D!