The books I chose to explore were Peppa's Chinese New Year, and A is for Awesome - 23 Iconic Women Who Changed the World. I chose these books because they had a simple aesthetic that was very different form one and other. They also had a style that was more complex than you would see in a brief look lover. Lets start with Peppa:
At first I thought the style in this book was very simple but upon closer inspection it was more layered than I thought. While it looks like simple shapes and strokes, each shape is unique and hand drawn. The main face of each character is surrounded by a stroke that appears to also be hand drawn as it varies in width. These strokes also overlap at some corners adding interesting detail. Looking further, there are some shapes that just use the stroke, examples are the frame of the globe, or bristles on the paint brushes. I also found it interesting how the illustrator used the internal frames in the book. Using the lanterns to frame a scene not only reduces the amount one has to draw but can also create focus when a character "breaks" the border, as seen in the last image. The color pallet is rather plain, bright and playful. Typical of a children's book. Next is A is for Awesome:
I initially passed over this book as the style looked much to complex and hand made for this project. I looked close when I cam across "B is for Beyonce." the amount of texture and detail made it look hand made from a distance. Looking close I saw that most of the detail was produced by masking actual pictures, almost as if the artist drew the outlines then slid images behind them. The precision of this masking is really impressive. This style is used for almost everything except the faces and hands of the characters. The actual skin of the people is created with basic vector shapes with clever gradients applied. I found the dog in picture 2 to be an interesting overlap of these styles. The text looks hand drawn but might be a font, I couldn't really tell. The Katharine Graham page included one interesting detail: background images. The newspaper clippings create an interesting texture and framing in the background.