Dadi

{ dadi } is a silent picture book illustrated by Melissa Sunjaya during the quarantine period in July 2021. In these isolation days, I initiated this project under the mentorship of artist/printmaker Andrzej Klimowski through an online program from the Royal College of Art in London. A silent tale is a sequence of wordless pictures where the readers can play with the narratives and arrange the mood and tone of the story. The drawings in this tale took inspiration from an ancient Javanese fable known as ‘Timun Mas’ (The Golden Cucumber). The project aims to revive the readers’ imagination by retelling this famous but almost forgotten folktale.

The book is 150 mm x 210 mm (portrait format), with a spine thickness of 12 mm and a soft cover of 310 gr card stock with gatefold flaps. There are 36 sequential drawings in black ink with accents of honey yellow. Each illustration is 100 x 100 mm and presented in a spacious negative space for the readers to pencil in their narratives. The book holds 40 sheets of 90 gr uncoated paper, French-folded and bound with Japanese stitching.