Thursday 22 October 2015

Creating a bear Illustration and memories too...




This is a tiny corner of a picture book project I have been working on with the experienced eye of a children's book editor. 
Like certain pieces of music can evoke  memories, the textures I created by hand for this illustration will always remind me of my current home and 2015. Our old, scarred chopping block  made the tree hollow. A clay disc by potter Johnathon Garret I bought 17 years ago and which survived tribes of kids playing in the garden created the bears fur. The weathered 80 year old shed doors (keeping the shed up!)  and a rushmatting door mat created the trees. Everything I have used to create texture using wax crayons, graphite and inks has a story and a practical  use.

I travel back in time to Cambridge 1990  whenever  I hear the evocative Koln concert by Keith Jarrett and the beginning of a romance.  And  I will look at this illustration in years to come and remember how much I disliked chopping the logs! 













4 comments:

  1. Wonderful capturing of texture looks superb

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    1. Thanks Hazel.. always love that part of creating an illustration.

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  2. That's such a beautiful painting Polly. One of the pleasures (and duties?) of being an artist is to preserve certain types of memories. We encode and enfold the past and the present and leave some sort of beguiling trail that is evidence of our fruitful search for wholeness.

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  3. Thank you Rob. True words indeed.

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