Alison McCabe and I have submitted to the Writer’s Loft Children’s Poetry Book Anthology. The year’s theme is “magical creatures” and Alison crafted an absolutely beautiful poem about gnomes. I continue to be mesmerized by how Alison writes, she makes it look so easy!
Below is the illustration I submitted to accompany the poem. We will not know if our submissions have been accepted for several months - so keep your fingers crossed! 🤞
I wanted to share with you all the “making of” this piece. I started with a sketch of course, but as you can see the sketch is more of a vague map than an exact blueprint. Several things have changed...
The tree has been shifted to the right and the gnomes hat has transformed to be a hat-camouflaged-as-a-mushroom rather than a mushroom-hat (an important gnome-fashion distinction!). The moon is lower in the sky (a change made because of the language of the poem). I also removed the gnome’s legs - I wanted to show this as a “cut away” to an unground scene but after playing with it a bit with cut paper it was visually unclear. I decided it was more legible without showing the legs you shouldn’t be able to see.
Once I was ready to cut paper, I decided to make this composition in two parts: the scenery and the main character of the scene. I did this because I wasn’t sure how large I wanted the main character to be in relation to the scene, or how close in the foreground the gnome appeared, so I made the two piece separately so I could play with the scaling digitally. In these images you can see the unedited collages without any of the digital line work added.
I finished the piece with the digital line work. I usually reserve this only for small details that are too cumbersome or difficult to cut with paper like pupils and shoelaces. For this image I kept going and used the line art to add more layering with the foliage. I liked the look of the line work foliage on top of the cut paper foliage. I think this technique added some depth to the piece without weighing it down with more paper. Overall I think this was a successful experiment that I will use again with another piece.
Hopefully I will be mailing you all published copies of both poem and gnome in the following year. But if not, at least we will always have this newsletter 🥲