New Opportunities and Exciting Challenges

I have been quite busy the past 6 weeks working on an exciting project. I was selected along with another 11 artists from Creative Souls to illustrate a book of 42 poems by a British poet. Each artist chose the poems they wanted to work on - I chose 4 pieces. The poet's work is epic, very allegorical and has a medieval quality I believe. Needless to say, it has been a real challenge connecting with another person's mental and emotional images arising from his own imagination and incredible breadth of vocabulary. The latter has doubly challenged me this past week as I volunteered to proof read the approximate 75-80 page work. First of all I was amazed at how many words - English words - that we Americans spell differently from the people of Great Britain. For instance words such as "color" or "harbor" the Brits spell with a "u" in them, "colour", "harbour". That is just one difference. I soon got used to checking the dictionary and seeing the British spelling at the end of the definition. Then too even though I was an Art major in college I was also a Creative Writing major at that time - many years ago. I have spent my life writing and many times while working as a free-lance graphic artist I was called upon to proof-read text for the printers - long before computers or spell-check. So proof reading comes natural to me. But as I mentioned, this British poet has an incredibly voluminous vocabulary. I learned at least a dozen new words - words that I never saw or heard before. Plus like many creatives, myself included, he makes up his own words occassionally when "real" words just don't suffice. So it has been an interesting experience. As far as the actual book to be produced and published, I will keep you posted. I have produced many digital pieces for this assignment, many more than were needed, but again I was learning along the way. I am sharing one of my pieces here that was excluded from the final selection. It is a favorite of mine.