I’ve started a new illustrated poetry children’s book for Storyberries.com This time I’m writing and illustrating a bunch of poems. Up till now each book, Alphapets, Alphapets Too and Numpurrs were a single poem long. Lots of illustrations tied together with one poetic story.
So this new project feels dangerously different and daring. I find it helpful in a creative life to scare yourself now and then.
In my last post I showed my 3.5 x 5 x 1 inch poetry sketchbook, that I’ve worked in over the last several years, and told of reading through and sticky note flagging potential poems to be illustrated. Here it is bristling with sticky notes.
Here’s a close look at 3 of my poetry sketchbook pages that I chose to illustrate this week.
And here’s the weeks finished pages:
I’ve decided to hand write and hand draw everything in this book. Since Storyberries.com is a website of ebooks for kids my thinking is that it’d be fun, whimsical, amusing – harmlessly mischievous even – to fill a digital medium, the ebook, with hand-made marks.
As a working title – and probably the final title – I’m using “Patch La Belle: playful paintings and poetry”. The definition of the word “patch” and the definition of the French “la belle” play into my thoughts as this project feels like a patchwork of many lovely things. A stitching together of meditations on a theme of pleasant day dreams.
Anyway, more here next Monday and thanks for reading!
Part 1: It`s a good idea to use handwriting in your book, it makes it more personal I think. You write beautiful poems, I can imagine hearing snores and see the puppy licking and tasting everything around, and next time I sit down I promise I will be careful. Part 2: Kittys knit look exactly like mine ha,ha. I love your idea of using off-white paper. Maybe I`m a bit nostalgic, but it reminds me of old books inherited from previous generations and many, many cozy nights with bed-time stories.
Thank you so much for your comment and for your encouragement and enthusiasm!! I appreciate hearing your thoughts too…especially about old books. 😊
It`s easy to be enthusiastic with the work you do. It`s so much fun and inspirational (?? sorry, thats a difficult word for me, did I write it right?) learning what other creative people do.
Thank you!! And you wrote your comment very well. This is precisely how we creative people learn best – we see, and are inspired by, other creative people working and we watch their working methods over time. As we watch the other artist we try some of their methods and from that effort we learn what methods also work for us (and which don’t). This is the way of creativity.
I do hope that sharing my methods here on my blog will be of some help to you as you make your own creative path. That hope of helping others is why I do this blog. Thanks again for writing your kind comments!