Linn Hugo

the owl and the pussycat

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THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT is a retelling of an Edward Lear tale of two lovers. The story was inspired by a line from the original short story: ‘they sailed away for a year and a day’. The version that Linn decided to tell of this wellknown story represents the gap in between the journey as the owl and the pussycat search for a ring in order to finally get married.

LINN HUGO

LINN HUGO was born in 2000 and is from the Western Cape, South Africa. She is a third year BA Visual Communication student at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography, majoring in Applied Illustration Design. She has a love for illustration as well as combining digital and traditional techniques to create something unique to her as an illustrator. She wants to transport viewers of her illustrations through a portal into her imagination and create weird, wonderful things.

JURY REPORT The images are interesting and contemporary, even bordering on being obscure. Certainly not mainstream, perhaps not so clearly geared towards the common denominator of ‘young readers’ and therefore not ideal for publishers, but I do feel that experimenting should be encouraged in young work as well.

Linn’s entry is the only one that really pushes the boundaries of space, characterisation and medium. The simplicity of her scenes leaves a lot of room for self-interpretation and imagination.

I was struck by the playfulness and simplicity in Linn’s illustrations. Her work is a bright spot for me in the sense that she is the only one who plays around a bit with ideas and technique, and does it partly by hand (which is a bonus for me). I like the mixed media combination she uses and the cutting and pasting of paper, combined with watercolours and photos. The unconventional way she runs the text through the illustrations, as well as the layout of the pages and the compositions of her illustrations, make her work exciting, and I would love to watch her in the future.