The Grandeur of the Forest Floor: Making a tree stump

     Early in the design process for "Search For The Sugar Puff Hollow" I came across an inspiring image from an old set of science booklets.  The picture (below) was so dreamy and mysterious I wanted to capture elements of it for my book.  It portrayed a grandeur of the forest floor that I hadn't seen before.

I went about figuring out how to make an almost life-sized tree stump.  I didn't want it to be heavy so I needed a structure that was extremely light weight.  This was before I had a soda stream and I was going through a lot of Perrier bottles (and feeling guilty about it).  I love finding ways to recycle plastic bottles and I had begun to save the bottles just in case I could use them for the book.  SO I hot-glued all my perrier bottles together and and made them into the tree stump structure.



After that I covered it with tinfoil and papier mache to create the exposed roots and the top of the stump.  But what to cover it with?
     I had been using yarn to cover some of my trees and really wanted a special yarn to cover the stump since it was a close-up of a tree.  I had found a few sources on Etsy.com for coiled yarn.  My favorite was a shop called faroeviking in Ottawa.  I contacted Heidi who spun and died all of her yarns and she made me 2 skeins of custom dyed and coiled yarn.  You can read more about Heidi here.  It really turned out beautifully.






Oldies But Goodies: Venus Hum

I was just going through some files and happened upon these images I did with Kip Kubin for the Venus Hum album The Colors In The Wheel.  That was a really fun project.  I was told to just make whatever I wanted.  What a dream.  This is how the bees for Search For the Sugar Puff Hollow were born.  They started out with a story about some bees who ran away from home and died.  They became ghosts, forever hunting for their hive.  It was a sad story but I was really into dreamy, dramatic stories at that time.  Who am I kidding, I still am.  For the new book I used the same character, changed their look and brightened up their story.  Here are some of the images from the album artwork for Venus Hum.










Introductions: Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow

I would like to introduce you to some of the characters from my new book, "Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow".  I created 17 new characters for this book.  In all, I constructed over 80 creatures (many duplicates) to tell the story of 3 bees who run away from home.


Peapod the caterpillar


Sweetie


Teacup


Nickel the grass mole


The Schusselfuss


Nimble the butterfly

"Search for the Sugar Puff Hollow" will be available on September 14th at the ProtoPulp children's book festival in East Nashville.  More info will be coming soon.