The Yellow Flowers - 2011
Erika Pal
Erika Pal is born in Budapest. She started drawing at a very young age and her dream was to become an illustrator. So in 2007 she got a bachelor's degree in Illustration and Animation at the Kingston University in London. During her second and third years, her picture book concepts were twice highly recommended for the Macmillan Prize. She also won the national competition for Booktrust’s Big Picture logo.
In the past few years Erika Pal has illustrated several books for Frances Lincoln Publishers, while she was pursuing her interest in experimental print making. She is preparing more picture book ideas for publication, while she is studying for a master’s degree at the Brighton University on the highly regarded Sequential Design and Illustration course and working on an experimental stop-motion animation about dreams.
On the Internet, in a hidden corner of her website, I found a Flash animation which Erika Pal made about the encounter scene with the yellow flowers from The Master and Margarita.
It was made in 2007 on her university BA Illustration and Animation course. She was given a task to present an innovative idea on how text and image co-exist, with only a week to complete the work. She had no time to set up a rostrum camera, so she scanned more than 50 drawings and rendered the movement digitally in Macromedia Flash. In July 2011, Erika remastered her animation for publication on this website, adding music of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to it.
Erika Pal: «With the freedom of choosing any text, I randomly opened a page of one of my favourite novels - The Master and Margarita. The line read: 'It’s an ugly colour'. These words set off one of those wonderful surreal chance encounters in the novel that occur on many levels ranging from the profound to the mundane. I wanted to depict this seemingly mundane episode as a miserable transitory phase, but very poetic. Such contradic-tions inspire me, but the reason I particularly like this novel is that Bulgakov doesn’t underestimate his readers’ imagination!»;.