In early 2011 I started to think about creating a working group dedicated to the universe of illustrated books and focused on this idea of hybrid books... so I talked to friends here in Brazil and some Italian illustrators, an Italian editor friend of mine (who referred me to some writers ) and from there the first attempts to accomplish something began, this gave birth to the group called Red Rhino. It is formed by me, Alessandra Tadiotto, writer, Lorenza Trojan and Oto Maki, both illustrators.
The initial work was very complicated and we had to organize ourselves in a very different way than the traditional way, since each of us lives in different parts of the world... so emails, talks and chats. Nowadays we already have a well-perfected method and this is the product of more than 1 year of hard hard and sweaty work.
In October 2011, we finished our first book in a series about feeding little ones. They are cardboard books predisposed for finger puppets. We are trying to sell this project in the US market through my agent Anna Johnson.
The idea of hybrid books, as I imagined, is unfortunately not very applicable to the market of today... the book is very expensive and with many difficulties in production and logistics, as many of these special books are produced almost entirely in China. But I still haven't abandoned the idea of producing these books in super limited editions in handmade mode and treating them as multiples.
Although we have good ideas and quality human material, it is not easy to enter this market and this is true for many countries today, we are in a time of crisis and we need to innovate, renew solutions. Even France itself, which is one of the most interesting markets for the picture book, is also suffering.
In the sense of renewal and innovation, Alessandra Tadiotto recently provoked me: creating a website for our project where we would produce digital books for free distribution, this to promote our work. I thought the idea was great and we are starting talks on creating the website and a plan to prepare the whole project, which will probably open later this year.
The idea is very simple, initially to create a blog, where we will talk about various things related to illustrated books, post new projects, stories and studies of the "in progress" of the realization of illustrations and layouts of these tales.
Personally, I have several projects for which I would like to make them available in this form: a story about Nuvens and another about Jardim das Amoreiras.
I did extensive research on the different types of binding or presentation solutions for books. It's really fun to see that a book can have different formats and packaging solutions.
The research collected a multitude of sources, a lot of material we find directly on the internet, on YouTube. There I found a multitude of artists who have great solutions in this regard... and almost always adopt workshops to disseminate their ideas and concepts. The YouTube playlist I make available here has over 3 hours of video: Books Possibilities. All this research gave rise to a series of hybrid book concepts, as I called them, where various types of formats and solutions converge.