Brothers Grimm & Natalie Frank

This is the first of book I designed with the artist Natalie Frank: the original tales of the Brothers Grimm, with her drawings.
For those who are not familiar with them, the original versions of the Tales, as written by the Brothers Grimm, were not for children, then or now. They are full of gruesome punishments, incest, murder and otherworldly happenings. They also contain a number of interesting female characters with surprising control over their own fates.

I saw the tales as being dark—they are weird and sometimes nightmarish, and I wanted this feeling to be a visual part of the book. Natalie's drawings are a juxtaposition of this dark material and very bright colours, so I wanted them to really glow out of the darkness. I devised a layout that worked with borders. On the pages with Natalie's colour drawings, I used a black background. On the text pages, I asked Natalie to draw borders in black and white for each story.

This resulted in a lot of extra drawing for Natalie! I had her draw one border for each story, and on facing pages I flipped it. This made for some interesting intersections of shapes and faces in the gutter.
I also didn't want space at the ends of stories, so as I laid it out, where the text fell short on the last page of the story, I would go through and find places where I could get Natalie to make little illustrations of the text to insert and cause the text to flow to the bottom of the last page. This caused even more drawing for Natalie. But we had a ton of fun with these. All sorts of strange things: dead animals and bones and axes dripping with blood. For some reason both Natalie and I found this hilarious.

Because the borders were drawn to-size on art paper, I had a conundrum in terms of how to deal with the paper background. The black and white drawings also include white paint, which is whiter than the paper, and I didn't want to lose any of it by knocking out the paper background to pure white. So I decided to keep the paper texture for all of the text pages. Natalie's chapter openers are also drawn on a full page, to-size, so when they were photographed they all had to maintain the same paper tone throughout.

Natalie wanted a little bit of me in the book, besides the design, so the front and back matter have some little photographic interruptions made by me, with mixtures of dead things (flowers, seed pods, a bird's wing, bones) and fur, gems and other bits I have lying around, and I did the lettering on the title page.

The book size is 9 x 12 and has 272 pages of glorious words and artwork.