Out of Boxes

I'm looking forward to continue working on a variety of art projects once we manage to get all the boxes in our new home unpacked and I can get my paints out again.  This summer has been quite busy with the completion of the construction of our new house and my family’s move.  Since the beginning of this year, I have been packing, packing, packing things in boxes and I’m so happy and relieved to finally be UNpacking… Yay!
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While loading & unloading stuff in and out of boxes, I was reminded of the artwork I did for a children’s book I created shortly after I had my first baby.  In the early 1990’s, I became a ‘stay-at-home’ mom and to keep myself busy during naptimes, I wrote & illustrated a little story relevant to my days back then. Though non of the artwork I have been working on lately is child oriented, I am having fun remembering those younger, more playful times.

Here's a little bit of the art that I came across from a few of the pages.  Basically, it’s a children’s book created during the interim of when my first born was born and when he learned to walk.  Created quite a few years before the movie “Toy Story” and many years post “Nutcracker”, the story illustrates the imagined play of a baby with his toys until he finds the inspiration to balance himself on two feet and *walk*.  ~  All the action kicks off with the baby’s epiphany that the “Jack-in-the-Box” actually has very long legs...

Someday I will have to piece together all the pictures… I remember that I also synchronized the story to changing spring weather out the kitchen window as all the colors progressively became greener and more colorful and as mom worked on completing the task of cleaning & shining the all the dirty dishes in the background. I called the story, "Dirty Dishes and a Dozen Dances". 

The whole creation was a very fun and educational exercise for me since I used the project to teach myself perspective. Before playing around with these imagined images, I had never really studied how to draw perspective or the math of scale. Of course, way back then I didn't have any kind of computer to use as a resource either.

The book also had text that I wrote as well which was naturally all in rhyme...