Dear Readers,
This week we bring to you Christine Curitana, who designed our unique educational tool called MageQuill. For those of you who aren’t aware of our one-of-a-kind tool that is specifically designed to help students with their literacy and language skills, we designed after a lot of brainstorming because we wanted to give students a platform they would love to learn in. MageQuill not only helps them to refine their skills, but also promotes self learning and lets the young writers explore the world of publishing. The best projects make their way into printed books and the good ones are turned into eBooks before we market them. Here’s Christine’s interview with us:
1. Magequill is a new concept for a publishing house. The interface is brilliant and is great for an amateur who wants to explore writing and publishing. What’s your take on it as the designer of Magequill?
It’s nice to see that there is a platform for amateurs that wants to dabble with writing and publishing. A lot of times people are afraid to try out things that look complicated, serious and more-so with things that look like it only cater to professional writers. As a designer for it, I wanted to go with the minimalist route and still keeping true with a cat’s playful nature. In this way, amateurs would feel more at ease in involving themselves in a new hobby.
2. You are studying Arts at the moment along with designing Bombadil’s covers and MageQuill. Have your current are of study been helpful in what you do?
It is, my area of study focuses on graphical designs so it does help me a lot at times. Doing research about anything that involves art and design is my pastime as well, google helped me a lot with that. Along with making design mistakes and learning from it was a big help too.
3. An artist finds inspiration in the unlikeliest of things. Please tell us something about what inspired you to take up designing?
Let’s see, I can’t really specifically tell what inspired me to go to uni for that but when I was a kid I grew up designing characters, their clothes, personalities and their stories as well. I also loved to design houses in sims and grew up being able to immediately notice whether a design fits or not. So I think those are the factors that paved way into me being not only as a painter, but a designer as well.
4. Tell us about the covers you have already designed for Bombadil?
The first cover I did for them was for the book of Ryan Ruggiero titled, Voices with Feathers: Stories of African Youth. I had a lot of fun designing it and my main inspiration for it were, the summary and objectives of the book itself and the books of Rick Riordan that I had collected. I was excited when I was told I will be working on a book cover as being a book cover artist is also one of my dreams.
5. Tell us about the areas of art that inspire you the most?
Concept arts, character arts, illustration, book covers, graphic novels, storybook arts, statues and historical arts are what inspires me the most. I do think good stories, as well as good music, also inspires me to be brave enough to tackle the blank canvas in front of me.
6. Who is your favorite artist in history and why?
I admit that I have this problem of admiring a nice piece of art but not remembering the painter as I have a short term memory. But I admire a lot of classical arts and do art studies with them since they are very inspirational. One artist that immediately comes to my mind is Michelangelo haha, everyone knows him but I adore how he paints the human anatomy and how it is the main subject of his paintings. I also love his statues and I find myself staring at all the fine details and just having this urge to touch it and feel the form in my hands.
7. Since Bombadil is based in Scotland and you are from Philippines, the cultural difference must be huge. Did you find it difficult to cope up with the nature of cover designing for a Scottish publishing house?
It wasn’t really that difficult since I’ve experienced cultural differences since I was young. I grew up in the middle east and then came back here to study. Being exposed to that while I was young gave me ample time to being able to adjust whenever I have to indulge myself in a different culture.
8. Tell us about what you are working on at the moment?
I am currently working on designing Bombadil and Magequill’s website and I am very much pumped up to have it done and be shown to the world.
9. What are your visions for Magequill and how do you plan to work on enhancing it in the future?
I’ve been known in my classes as being ambitious especially with things I love. Someday, I plan to incorporate visual storytelling with Magequill’s features. I want to be able to combine art and writing because I believe that when these two are combined, they create something very powerful enough to leave a remarkable mark on its audiences.
