This image marks a turning point in my work where I’m beginning to fold my fantasy ideas into “real” botanical work. There’s no sketch to share because I designed it right on the panel.
When I was a kid, I loved those Doodle Art posters that you could buy at Spencer’s Gifts. You’d get a set of 18-20 markers with it and you’d go to town coloring that sucker in. There were themes: Butterflies, Sea creatures, Jungle, etc. Of course my favorite one was the Butterflies. I’d consult the encyclopedia or my scour the library for a book that would enable me to give each species their proper colors.
The back of my bedroom door seemed to always have one of these taped to it and when we’d move (which was often— about every 2 years), I’d carefully untape it, roll it up, and put it safely back into the cardboard tube with the others. When the one I was working on was again taped to the back of my door, it was like finally having the drapes hung back up.
One of the features these Doodle Art posters has was a thing the designers call “bump-outs”, or portions of the ink line drawing which extend past the live border of the art. I’d lived so long with the idea of bump-outs that I started using this strategy in my work in high school long after I’d stopped coloring in Doodle Art posters. I found other artists like Alphonse Mucha who also used this technique in their design and found that their work really resonated with mine.
What seemed to be a natural counterpart to the bump-out is the “carve out”. You can see this idea in the above image— it’s the irregular white space at the bottom of the image. I like to think it balances the extra volume of the bump-outs and adds a certain lively aspect to the overall design.
The art directors and editors of the children’s book “How Do You Sleep?” with Marshall Cavendish encouraged me to use bump-outs in the design of the spreads. And since then, I’ve used bump-outs in over a decade of garden calendar designs with Yankee’s Old Farmer’s Almanac. So, you could say it’s a “thing” with my work.
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Available as a print on ImageKind.com.