A few weeks ago, I got a nice surprise in the mail from Jules Young; After completing her page, she sent me the collaborative accordion book that is traveling around the world for many talented artists to make their mark on. I’m the 4th artist to get the book. Valeria Poropat started this project and so far it has traveled around Europe before making its way to me. I was very excited and inspired after seeing the first three panels, and quickly started brainstorming ideas of my own.

There was no set theme, so I thought about the project itself, and the phrase, “from here to there and back again” popped into my head. As I thought about it some more, I decided it made more sense from my point of view to switch the order of “here” and “there” to read, “from there to here and back again”. I liked the sounds of it, and started sketching out my idea.

After a few rounds of sketching, I came up with a composition that would work for the narrow orientation of the pages. I made a few quick copies to try out different colors.

When I was ready to transfer my sketch to the book for the final drawing, I ended up using a window as a lightbox, just to get the basic lines and composition that I’d already worked out in place.

Once I finished tracing, I drew the rest of the smaller elements, and drew over everything with an ink pen.

I then freehanded the remaining details in pen.

The last phase was adding color, which I took my time with, making decisions along the way. At one point the ribbon was going to be blue. I also considered pink, but in the end, I zeroed in on a cream color with accents of green, and I really like the natural feeling it gives the piece.

From left to right, the artists that have so far added drawings to the book are Valeria Poropat, Tricky Tanya, Jules Young, and me!

There are quite a few pages and artists left to go, so I’m really looking forward to see what each artist adds!