Books

Doing What We Want

Doing What We Want: An Alphabet Book for Girls
“A is for Amazing Alisha who Aspires to become An Astronaut.” This is an alphabet picture book that introduces both girls and boys to big ideas and greater career and human diversity through the use of big words and fun pictures. The whimsical and detailed illustrations are reflective of a global world in which anything is possible.
The illustrations feature young girls
and boys from many cultures with unique names, who many not get a chance
to see themselves featured as such
in books, or doing the things the children in these books are doing.
Closer to the end of the book, the page for letter Y, “Y is for You and whatever it is that You would like to do” - questions the reader about the future; engaging them in a fun critical thinking activity.

Cosmic Claudia

Claudia is a new character for a book I am working on that deals with goal setting and achieving in an abstract way. It will become a series of books that follows one little girls mission to become an astronaut. The story for this book is inspired by a former student in Peru, who contacted me to relay that they had managed to climb out of poverty into a career in aerospace engineering in Lima, Peru.

Negative Positive

As I continue to learn more about typography and its elements, it becomes increasingly apparent how influential and important positive and negative become. This set me on another couple of tangents about how we see positive and negative as words and how that carries into positive and negative spaces. Finally with all of it merging together I began to see correlations between space, timing, animation, and lesson planning and facilitation. This book begins to look at positive and negative as words and their correlations as such, it begins to break down what exactly is shadow and how this related to silhouette and how we understand things. Finally I begin to look at type through the reversal of positive and negative space and wonder that if we began to give equality rather than duality to negativity, if we may open to new perspectives and if that would influence our openness to learning and picking up new information.

Aroma Book

One of my long standing passions apart from art and education, is aromatherapy. I decided to begin the creation of a text book of sorts that describes the various remedies of certain essential oils. The pages do so in a way that separates the information out in a legible way which is aesthetically pleasing.

Wild Capture

Back in April I took some online courses at Calarts. One of the courses about Image-making and layout had a project in which we were to create 10 images and then display these images in a short visual book. I had created images of antelope, and upon creating the book was thinking about what it means to be free and in the wild, and how our picture snapping culture is quite opposite that.
On an aside, this is the first project I have ever completed where I have really grown to understand layout in a more beautifully complex way. Thank you Calarts!

Shakespeare Covers

Here is a variety of book covers based on the works of William Shakespeare. The first series is quite simple and deals with layout. The second series is based on the movement of letters and use of symbolism to give meaning to covers. The third series is illustrative and plays with positive and negative space through silhouette. The final cover is a mix of the previous 3 series that deals with layout, abstract illustrative symbolism, and play of space to tell the story within the cover.