Birdlore!
A perseverant young activist and SO MANY BIRDS...a new picture book!
Getting this manuscript from Knopf in my inbox was super exciting, and I knew immediately it would be a big, wonderful challenge. Any illustration project with very particular, specific subject matter (and historical non-fiction at that), means research, as well as being awful careful when it comes to portraying all the characters, walking or winged. Jess Keating wrote Florence Merriam Bailey’s story so beautifully, and immediately brought out a lot of inspiration for me.
To celebrate Birdlore’s upcoming publication (March 18th!), I’m doing a series of posts about the book making process, what some of the initial inspiration was, how I worked both traditionally and digitally in my continuing attempt to ditch digital as much as possible, etc, etc. I also have a promo video I made for our publisher that I’ll decide whether to share or not - must get over the self-consciousness!
The amount of time I spent on pinterest was pretty ridiculous but I needed some steady starting points for what life would have been like for our main girl, Florence. Who was she as a girl in the mid-late 1800’s upstate New York? I figured they were pretty well off, given the freedom she had and future privilege of going to Smith College, but she was at a very young age very attuned to nature and spent a healthy amount of time in the woods, observing birds and other wildlife. She was a young scientist! Here’s a bit of what helped guide me, and created a starting palette of the direction to go:
And of course thoughts on what Florence might have looked like or seemed like, in image. And so lovely to have some actual photos of her as well.
Florence herself wrote several books and over fifty journal articles. I wandered a meandering path after finding pictures of her letters and observations. I was able to get her handwriting into one of the spreads via little notes I had birds carrying, and added bits of handwriting throughout the book to reinforce this true story.
To connect with Florence at the start of the picture book, and as Jess begins the story with a quote from our lovely Flo, I painted the quote and a little bird friend curiously checking out her note.
Thanks for reading this first post on Birdlore! Next I’ll talk about the art - media and technique and what a struggle it was (honestly).
Till then :) Devon