A Dubray Christmas
During the warm(ish) summer I had the wonderful task of illustrating snowy and cosy Christmas scenes for Dubray Books 2019 Christmas campaign. I usually illustrate children’s books, however illustrating a campaign for a marvellous Irish book store was a dream project. I worked with the lovely designer Natalie from Dubray, who asked me to conjure-up a triptych of cosy Christmas window scenes, which would compose the front elevation of a whimsical Georgian facade. I was also asked to include subtle references to familiar festive books within each scene.
I created the ‘Dubray Household,’ using the brand colours associated with the bookstore - navy, green, pink and yellow being the main colours. The left scene is inspired by ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe’ by C.S. Lewis. Inside, two siblings are costumed as Aslan the lion, and the White Witch; while Mr Fox and the magical lamppost stand within ‘Narnia’ outside. The righthand scene was inspired by one of my favourite books (and illustrators) ‘The Snowman’ by Raymond Briggs. Inside a fire-lit festive room, a little boy enjoys his hot cup of cocoa while admiring his newly created friend outside. I added a little nod to another popular book series you may have heard of, with the Gryffindor coloured scarf. And finally, the middle scene is home to a jolly little elf who hand-delivers holiday letters and popular Christmas books.
My initial sketch of the Dubray house. I decided to draw the three scenes together first, to make sure they aligned to one another, creating a visually cohesive scene. I then separated the sketch into three components and drew them in Photoshop as individual scenes. I did so because the files had to be very large in scale.
The final illustrations adorn the windows of all the Dubray stores. As you can see, there’s even large cut-outs of certain elements of the scenes - hence the very big files! - such as the lamppost, which has beautiful twinkling lights within it. When creating the illustrations I had to make sure each element was on its own layer, and that the shapes were easy to cut out. This was an added consideration I had to bear in mind when illustrating each scene.
The Dubray Galway store, where you can see the festive cut-outs in the window.
The front cover of the beautiful Christmas catalogue. My illustrations also adorn other marketing materials such as gift cards, promotional posters, website, bookmarks, and social media.
The back cover of the Christmas catalogue has my favourite scene - I shouldn’t have a favourite, but this is the first scene I illustrated and I loved getting lost in their playful expressions, attire, and movements. Thank you to Natalie and all at Dubray for asking me to illustrate this campaign - it was such a pleasure to work on.
~ Rachel x