These have been a crazy couple of months haven’t they? I was lucky enough that the last two months of pandemic and quarantine also coincided with work on the wonderful Cayuga Island Kids written by Judy Bradbury and published by City of Light, a publisher from Buffalo, NY. It is a book full of charm and the five young protagonists have very distinct and interesting personalities. I look forward to expand more on the subject in future posts, but for now things are still in progress and this is more of a semi-official announcement, but since I added a couple of images to my portfolio I thought I would at least introduce the project briefly. As this is a chapter book, it consisted of black and white inside illustrations and I have to say in the beginning I was afraid that the quality of my work was going to suffer. If you notice in most of my pieces I really like to use bright colors and play with interesting palettes and from the get go I could see what colors I wanted to associate with each character. I found however that not only the work didn’t suffer, I also gained something from the limitation of the black and white: I could pay more attention to the textures and the shading for example, as well as add more patterns to make things visually interesting and I LOVE adding patterns to clothing. There were also several scenes in nature and let me tell you, I lost myself in drawing different flowers and trying to convey with different shapes what I would normally have conveyed in color. 

These kids (and their lovely pets) have definitely helped me get through a very emotional and intense time, and I hope that their positive attitude will delight many readers for years to come. Thank you Cayuga Island kids!