Poly Bernatene
Poly Bernatene

 

THE TICKLE TREE

CHILDREN’S BOOKS GOLD AWARD

PROFESSIONAL

2009 – IMAGES 33

Poly was born in Argentina and has been drawing ever since. She graduated from Art School, where she developed a great interest in managing different techniques and enjoying her work, which has always been based on experimentation and diversity. Poly has established herself an exciting career as professional illustrator, having published more than 70 children books in Argentina, Spain, UK, Australia, France, Taiwan and USA.

The Tickle Tree meant a big step in my career, with this book I discovered the power and the poetry that images have together with the words and how a story can be enriched exploring through my own artistic interpretation. Its about exploring the imagination and children’s dreams.”

“I have worked with the main publishing houses from the UK, but receiving peer appreciation despite being a foreigner was one of the most wonderful surprises of my life. It was a great honor for me to be awarded.”

polybernatene.com

BRIEF: A journey into the dreams and imagination of children can take you to unexpected places. Anyway, I have an obsession for circular, cyclic stories and I finally found myself working in that way with The Tickle Tree too.

MATERIALS: Mixed technique, collage and Adobe Photoshop.

RESEARCH: Explore my inner, be attentive to the games and experiences with my children. They were a big inspiration for this project.

PROCESS: I start doing lots of sketches with loose ideas, using thumbnails to see the integral development of the story is very important to me. Then I work from spots and textures, compositions to continue working with the colour in the computer.

RESISTANCES: I can help the obsession to going back all the time to my steps to keep looking for details, not so much technical but so it is more in keeping with the general structure.

INSIGHT: When you look for the better way to tell a story, lots of potions appear, sometimes you have to sacrifice good ideas to be faithful to the ultimate aim of the work: to tell a story well.

DISTRACTIONS: Sometimes my inspiration became my distraction…enjoying the day with my family and losing myself in the net seeing other colleagues’ wonders.

NUMBERS: 24 hours a day is not enough to do everything I would like to do in a day, 7 days a week is a short time for me, 30 days are not many, 3 to 4 months is needed to do a book, 12 months are few for the entire amount of things I want to accomplish.

FINAL THOUGHTS: I think I’ll never stop looking, experimenting and playing. Keep growing and learning from the mistakes, this way I can enjoy something where I work wholeheartedly: illustrating children’s books!







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