Almost 2 years ago, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the time when my kids were much younger. We lived in a smaller house and they would gather around me as I made food from scratch. I could interest them in anything I was doing. Of course, at the time, I was exhausted and overwhelmed and needing space. But now, as my youngest draws closer to leaving the nest, I am nostalgic for the time when we made pizza together and drew a smiley face with the spaghetti sauce to measure out the exact amount of sauce a pizza needs.
In January 2025, I was revisiting collage as a medium. I had tried it during the pandemic and absolutely hated it. But I had recently become a patron of a collage artist and decided to give it a try again. Since my goal is to write and illustrate Children’s books, I needed to make sure I could successfully create children and adults in collage.
I gravitated to combining these two needs and began a series of kids cooking with recipes from my family’s life together. The first illustration, I thought went well. But then I changed and grew and decided not to include that illustration in my series. You can see a little of the growth and change I went through in these first 3 illustrations:
As I worked on these pieces in January 2025, it was so therapeutic. I longed for the time when we would make a pizza together, or discover that children can be trained to like asparagus if you put enough cheese and bacon on top.
The art fed my heart and soothed my soul.
The first few illustrations were just of my 3 oldest kids. Since we are as white as a family can get, I realized that as a children’s book illustrator, I needed to illustrate more than just white kids, I moved into a few darker skin tones.
And I have more work to do in that area…to find the best skin tone that will still allow you to see the facial features. And the composition work that will allow a light value around a darker skinned figure. I struggle with that with the lighter skin toned people as well. I need to create a different value around the face and arms and legs so they don’t disappear.
I’m still using collage as a medium for my artwork. I’ve got at least 1 book that I’m working on and planning on creating the art out of collage.
Since these are basically experiments, you can find them in my shop as recipe cards (with the recipes they were inspired from), notecards, originals, and soon prints of 5 of them.
