Rhyme Rag Project

IGI illustrator Ale Mercado shows us his latest project for the Kilkenny County Council Arts Office. Ale says, the idea is to give young poets in Kilkenny a way to get their job out there… and do that with the best possible quality.


I’ve been involved in this project for three years now. The Arts Officer in Kilkenny, Mary Butler, had the idea but wasn’t too sure on how to materialize it. I suggested using illustration and design some interesting way of showing them. The budget was very low that first year so we did a non-standard 12 pages concertina fold brochure that opened like a book with one generic illustration for the 16 poems selected.

Last year we had 32 poems selected (of over a hundred submitted) so we went for a proper publication with a comic-book format. One illustration per poem. (I was drawing and inking them the weekend we were in the lighthouse) It was a great success.

This year we had more than 250 poems submitted but we decided to put more energy into the illustrations. We were trying to use more of the comic narrative to tell a story that would run parallel to the poem. The poems were disappearing in between all the panels so I decided to step back a little and leave the poems very clearly distinctive in the design. I still used a good few comic-book narrative tools to illustrate the poems.

I’ve done everything in a bit more than a month. All illustrations start with elements inked (I use hunt102 nibs). scanned in and then put together in illustrator, photoshop and painter. I normally streamline my line work so the workflow gets easier, especially when composing the page.

Thanks for sharing that Ale. Some great work.

For further information on Rhyme Rag contact the Arts Office, No. 72, John Street, Kilkenny on 056 7794138 or e-mail mary.butler@kilkennycoco.ie /niamh.finn@kilkennycoco.ie. Arts Office opening hours 9am – 1pm + 2pm – 5pm Mon – Fri

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Books, Illustration, Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.