January 2020

First traditional drawings of the year:

Book #3 - Life Issues

More on the full drawing-on-books project here.

Thanks for viewing,
Meruna.

A Book Project - Part Two - Making a Book

Here I’m going to talk more about the process of making an artist book from scratch and my personal experience in this endeavour. For more info on the project, check out part one.

The English/Italian illustrator Sara Fanelli was also influential in this project, especially her book Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am, which was frequently consulted in the making of the final and new book. Here I had help, my teacher and her assistant, the latter having plenty of experience with producing books, were vital to the creation of this project. I think it’s very important if you’re considering making a book that you have people who know their stuff to consult on the practical matters, this is priceless compared to a ton of research. Stuff like the size of the book and the paper you print on can make or break your creation.

They also helped me select the interventions which were to be used in the new print. Seeing as this was a fine art project, the drawings which were too illustrationy or verging on cute were left out, and the more personal ones were kept. In the end I had too much material and the book was about 100 pages long. There is no text except for a small introduction/ presentation at the beginning and some info at the back. 

The colour red ties the book together, as there are whole spreads with red background throughout the book and the page number and text is also red. 

When it came to arranging the illustrations in InDesign, I was advised to keep a few compositional rules throughout the book – this is vital for cohesiveness and to avoid confusing the viewer. There are 5 rules and more exceptions, even though in hindsight I could have played around more with this. The reason is that having a 100 page book with repeating composition and no text makes you get a bit visually bored about two thirds in.

So the size is slightly shorter than an A4 standard paper, and it’s perfect for illustrations with lots of detail – I personally don’t see why an illustrator would go to the trouble of drawing details only to have them lost on too small a size book. Especially children books, I think, should be big. But I digress. The paper is slightly grainy and a little on the yellow side of white. 

I chose a navy blue paper for the cover and had to handwrite the title with a white marker. The title, Mă vei găsi într-o carte (You will find me in a book), comes from an illustration from the second object-book. I randomly drew a leaf inside the book and I imagined that’s what the leaves or flowers pressed in books would say. Of course, the meaning can be extended – aren’t the writers, the artists, or the characters the ones we find in the books we open?

After printing, which wasn’t without problems as the print guy left an empty page in the middle of the book and I had to repair it, the two copies of the book were hand bound by a girl who specializes in this (Grapho_mat) and I drew the title on the cover afterwards. She also took these really professional photographs with the blue background.

First page spread with introduction

Info at the end of the book

I got an A in my BA exam, and the book was a finalist in the 2016 edition of The Most Beautiful Books Competition in Romania.

Thanks for reading,

Meruna.

Artist Bio / Biografia Artistului

Hello, Internet!

I will be posting as Meruna (a shorter alias of my name, Miruna Elena Popescu) to try and document my journey as a freelance illustrator who is just starting out, having finished art school in the past year.

This post is basically an introduction and quick bio of my life as an art maker and how it all started out.
 
I was born and raised in Romania, and never left it, yet!
I'm a Pisces, born in '92, and my personality type is INFJ, if you believe in that sort of stuff :)
Mine is a typical story of "I liked to draw and my mom encouraged me to do so by buying me crayons and watercolors and helping me draw my dolls' bodies." So I liked to draw fashion sketches like a typical girly-girl who liked the Spice Girls and dressing up.

So I did that until about 3rd grade when I took some local art classes on and off for a few years, just an hour every Saturday with a teacher mainly interested in abstract art, just having fun with colors and compositions. After a break from that I just copied stuff from calendars in my spare time or vacations.
When I decided to apply to an art specialized high-school, I was tutored for a about a year and learned to draw still-lifes and paint compositions with characters.

In high-school I studied painting, because graphics weren't available, even if they would have been more suited to me. Dabbled a bit in fashion for a while there, too. I discovered graphic art after seeing an exhibition in my hometown (of Alina Rosca and Mircia Dumitrescu) and fell back in love with drawing, got a liner and studied the works of Durer and Gustave Dore. It was great!

So I applied for Graphics at the University of National Art in Bucharest. Learned a lot of great things there, met my people, and shifted my view of the world. I started in 2011 but finished in 2016 - no masters degree, but I took a year and a half off because of health and personal reasons. So I had two teachers, two sets of classmates and a bigger experience which I don't regret. Made a book for my BA, maybe I'll talk about that in another post.

So that's pretty much it, for the past months I've been getting my bearings, figuring out my style and what to do next and how to make money from it. 
 
I have an online art shop on Etsy with original art, some available for digital download, which means it is cheaper and faster to receive, no need to wait weeks for the post and you can print it instantly at home or at your local print shop!  Also, I’m available for comissions, so don’t hesitate to contact  me if you’d like to give a special gift to someone (a portrait, caricature, realistic drawing of ther favourite car/flower/animal etc.)

Join me on my journey as a freelance illustrator! 

I post every other day on Instagram. 

Meruna.