How it all began...

One day at work I was reading the Endicott Studio blog. This is a blog guaranteed to to take you down all manner of strange Faerie pathways and on this particular day I followed a link to the website of the artist Rima Staines. I was entranced by her gorgeous artwork and the wonderful muted colours of her illustrations. One picture in particular stuck in my little brain and would not leave:



© Rima Staines

This little alphabet niggled at me for a long time, sitting in the back of my mind until one day I decided that I would quite like to create an alphabet of my own - a Faerie Alphabet. In fact, why not a whole series of Alphabets, I thought optimistically. And I began to write a list - I love a good list, me. I write hundreds of  'em. For everything. They keep me right and I LOVE crossing things off them...because that means I've done stuff! So I wrote my first list of Faerie creatures, or tried to anyway. Finding a Fae creature beginnig with X proved difficult. Finding Fae creatures that I was inspired to paint starting with several other letters proved rather tricky too. But, undeterred by the uncomplete-ness of the list, I started sketching the letter A full of enthusiasm for my new project!

That was 3 years ago. Letter A's sketch was a success but letter B's wasn't so hot and the project was put aside while I worked on other things. Quite what prompted me to pick it up again, I'm not really sure, but as with so many initially simple ideas that I have, they get expanded, extended, changed in my head the more I think about them. And the idea of making what was going to be a small series of little paintings into a virtual book suddenly appeared.

I plan to explain some more about the digital process that made this possible in later posts but now it's time for a couple of pictures. All books start with the front cover:

© Shona M MacDonald 2012. All Rights Reserved.

And the title pages:



© Shona M MacDonald 2012. All Rights Reserved.