New book BABY BIRD
by Zosienka
Baby Bird is a debut picture book written by Andrew Gibbs and illustrated by Zosienka. They finished work on the book last summer after many months of writing, sketching, re-drafting and painting.
Baby Bird is about a little bird who has a tiny wing that doesn’t work the way it should. When the time comes to leave the nest, Baby aims for the sky but ends up on the ground, far from the other birds and discovers there can be more than one way to reach your destiny. It’s a story of friendship, perseverance and acceptance.
The River Lea and Lee Valley Filter Beds had a big influence on the book. The story is set around a little bridge over the river and one of the characters is a coot who loves a bit of ‘coot scooting’.
The illustrations are painted by hand, using gouache paints, then scanned and arranged digitally before going to print. Every scene in the book was planned out on a storyboard so that they could see where to place the text. Zosienka found a method that would allow her to make changes to the layout easily in case of any last minute alterations to the story. She painted each part of a scene separately and re-assembled the image like a collage on screen using the storyboard as a template. It was similar to the traditional animation method Andrew and Zosienka had once used on a film they made called Florian where paper puppets are made up of separate moving parts.
Buy the book here
Zosienka was also the illustrator of the Chatsworth Road street map in issue 6 seen here.
