AN ILLUSTRATED ALPHABETH
The 'Hidden Caps' series started accidentally. Besides my work as illustrator and designer I teach illustration, design and Adobe software at a design school. During one of my classes I instructed my students to experiment with letterforms. So just to show some examples I doodles around a bit with letters. Those doodles created new ideas which were the basis for the book you're now holding. Purely by looking at the form and rest form from a letter I saw that I could tell a story in which the letter took a natural place.
"The journey is without doubt more important and much cooler than the destination"
The whole proces has been a process full of joy and surprises. What started at first as an exercise changed intor a real project aftr I'd seen the presentation of Mr. Bingo at the FITC festival in Amsterdam 2016. He presented his process from Kickstarter project to publishing his book 'Hate mail'. The idea of making my own book based on the letter shapes took place in my mind. His entire approach to succeed in his project was an eye-opener for me and worked very contagiously.
BEHIND THE SCENES
For the project I made a lot of draft sketches. I've had a lot of fun doing that. Of course, I did nog use all the ideas I encountered on my trip. Because I've had so much fun during the process, I want to show some of the sketches I made. Just for laughs.
"It is so much more rewarding to challenge yourself, to dig deeper and to watch further"
Some ideas fell off the drawing board, and some even while working out in Adobe Illustrator. I also had to kill some darlings; I have rather a thing for aircraft, so I made a lot of aircraft sketches during the process. At the end I used none.