Yellow

When conceiving the idea for this story, I wanted to produce a book full of sunshine, life and love, where the images are flooded with light. The way I work as an illustrator is to put layers of paper and drawings on top of a lightbox and then take photos - as you can see in the image below:

This can create quite dark images, but I wanted to use the interesting medium to create images dancing in the light. It is an opportunity to create nostalgic images, reminiscent of old, over exposed photographs, or even memories. So once the whole idea of having something, or someone, missing from the story, this particular medium seemed perfect.

So, I wanted to use the colour yellow, with its connotations of life, light, sunshine, happiness and nature to evoke various simple pleasures of life that were to be felt in one particular day: egg yolks, the sand beneath your feet, daffodils, the moon and stars...

Yellow is also associated with Easter, for example the crocus flower and its yellow stamen, and therefore re-birth, spring and the cycles of life. Through the story I am aiming to portray a feeling of time, the natural cycles of the day, the seasons and life itself, it begins in the morning, ending at night, there are images from both summer and winter (you do need to suspend realism to an extent), and there are images of life and growth, with egg yolks, daffodils and pencil marks on the wall showing growing up. I want to use the colour yellow to show the small pleasures life brings us, along with the terrible, heart wrenching, purple aches of missing a loved one.