The second color spread for my picture book dummy, Lore & the Little Star, shows all four of my characters. Lore, having met the kid, the fox, and the bear, starts off on her adventure together with her new friends.  But since her name is Lore, I wanted there to be a moment in their long journey through the nighttime winter forest where they pass the time telling tales.  Who better to do so than Old Bear?  Below is the first draft, when the composition was a bit more complicated.

A few words from my illustration group let me realize what needed to change here, so I simplified the second half of the picture by removing the cub and the griffin, enlarged the whole group, altered the text boxes so that instead of two, there is one, and made Lore carry the Little Goat.  The bear telling tales of the ghostly king is a nod to my abiding love for King Arthur (whose name means "the Bear").  

"Tales of Kings and Enchantments", colored pencil, graphite, and gouache.  Color spread from Lore and the Little Star, written and illustrated by Jessica Boehman. Please do not reproduce without permission.

This past few months has been extremely busy as I started a new job as Assistant Professor of Art History and Studio Art at LaGuardia Community College in NYC and I moved into my second new apartment in the course of 11 months.  My new job has been wonderful; it's so great to teach both of the fields in which I earned my Bachelor's (my M.A. and Ph.D. are only in art history). It was tough but lots of fun and I look forward to getting more experience under my belt.

But as a result, many projects, including my dummy, momentarily had to be put on the back burner. It's time to remedy that situation.

My first color test for my dummy of Lore and the Little Star went through many sketches and variations before I settled on this current spread.  The first rendition, made about a year ago, looked like this:

I thought it was important to have a relatively close shot of my heroine early on in the dummy, so, she had to get bigger.  Secondly, the star needed to change in two ways.  I did not want it to have the shape of a geometric star, and I did not want the star to put out that much light. Since it was the littlest star in the sky, I wanted its light to be gentler and more magical.  Below is the new two-page spread.

"Lore Finds the Star" (two-page spread" for the dummy, Lore and the Little Star, written and illustrated by Jessica Boehman. Colored pencil, pencil, and gouache.  Please do not reproduce without permission.