What’s In These Woods?

I’ve been slowly working on a children’s book about things that can be found in the forests of the Pennsylvania/ New Jersey area.

It’s been a slow crawl, mostly because halfway through it I decided to start over with my illustrations, even after I spent over fifty hours on the preliminary pen sketches and first few watercolors.

I just can’t keep working on something if I think the delivery could be better.

Of course, I didn’t throw away the preliminary pen sketches and watercolors.

Here’s a sketch of the page on Morel mushrooms

Then I have a partially finished watercolor drawing of an IO Moth. I’m still hung up on the wording of this page; I’m trying to keep each page to one sentence. This isn’t intended to be a technical field guide, but really a quiet time book with a foray into native wildlife facts. All of the drawings, while somewhat fantastic, are pretty accurate to the colors and marking of the species.

And probably my favorite so far is a drawing about the hearing capabilities of wild rabbits. I gave it to a friend as a going-away gift; we both love Watership Down and while this wasn’t an intentional portrait of Hazel, or Fiver (I can’t decide, between the two, who it illustrates best), it reminded me of the story’s imagery and magic. She’s the only person I’ve ever met that has passages memorized.

I’ll post more illustrations as the project picks up again. If I get a publisher, well, that always helps move things along.