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The Mischievous Magpie

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 The Mischievous Magpie:


As I try to challenge myself with new projects, I also have a desire to make things that are fun and exercise my abilities with the book format. One thing I have been thinking about these days is knickknacks and holding onto things that mattered to you in the past. I have a whole box in my room full of old birthday cards, scrapbooks and diaries, stuffed animals and Nintendo games. And maybe horribly written pages about middle school drama might not add any value to my life now, but I like to think that these are all parts of me that exist in these objects and continue to live on, even if I’ve forgotten about them. 

While looking through this box, I found a thin, frail children’s book titled The Mischievous Magpie written by Gladys Booth, illustrated by Robert Dallet, and published by Litor Publishers Ltd.. This and a few others were not objects from my past that I had kept, but rather, objects from my father’s childhood that I was saving. He might not even remember these exist, but I liked that I had a piece of his childhood hidden somewhere in a box, living on. 

 Opening up this book, held by worn staples and stained with markers and water damage and time, I felt myself transported into a world of beautiful illustrations and simple storytelling. The plot details a magpie whose very presence brings issue to the meadow. The magpie destroys the starling’s eggs, steals the farmer’s glasses, and makes the wildlife community feel threatened. Once the boy intervenes and protects the wildlife, the magpie leaves and the peace is restored.

My redesign of this book was born from wanting to represent how community strengthens and how connections are made and broken. The magpie was the outlier, therefore the story would be physically singled out from the background with bright red pages that evoked a sense of warning and otherness. I loved the illustration style a lot, and I wanted that to be present throughout the book, even if I wasn’t using every image. The background of the larger spread, or the underlying image, was one of a community; a peaceful one that was threatened by the magpie’s existence. 

I also used simplistic shapes to differentiate the characters and objects in the story. A sharp, upside down triangle evoked a sense of danger that the magpie represented. Upright triangles represented the birds, and the circles represented the kindness of the boy or the innocence of the eggs. The lines, whether broken or solid, showed how relationships between characters and objects ebb and flow, how connections are made and broken over time. 

This project was a way to take a simple object from the past, probably held tightly by tiny fingers and reread obsessively by curious eyes, and analyze the relationships of what might be considered a very juvenile story. Through breaking apart elements of the book and representing how connections form and break, I found that the lessons that are taught to us in the past go a lot deeper than the surface level. 

Process: