Personal Renaissance

My creative project combines my love of creative writing and drawing into a journal that utilizes both components. I started my investigation by looking at books and illustrations around me and discovered a few books that really helped solidify my direction. Those books were: What it is by: Lynda Barry, The Book Thief by: Marcus Zusak, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by: Jon Scieszka, and Gingerbread Baby by: Jan Brett. Upon reflection, I decided to create a booklet that contained poems and short stories that I’d written, along with my own illustrations. I wanted to make the words become the pictures, and the images tell the story. Throughout the process I learned that I have strong themes of family and nature in my writing and artwork, and also what weaknesses I have in both areas. I struggled with depicting the human form and I learned that character-building is something I need to work on. I also learned that it was harder to combine my writing and my artwork than I thought it would be. At times I felt that there was a disconnect and no matter how hard I tried to bridge the gap between the two, they just didn’t want to mix together and enhance each other. As a result, this project taught me a lot about my writing and artwork, and I hope to continue creating these booklets to see how far I can push this idea of duality within my work