When my local SCBWI chapter sent out a call for entry for the yearly Tomie DePaola, I realised that it offered a great opportunity to create a new portfolio piece. Much like a plumber with the leaky faucet, it can be difficult to set aside the time to work on personal projects.
The brief for this one involved illustrating a passage of "Chicken Licken". That is quite a wordy text, and left to my own devices, I would have edited out about 90%! However, I'm glad that I played by the rules and included all of the text; it forced me to get creative to find a solution. In the end, I decided to use the text as part of the visual narrative and illustrated it as a ribbon which is becoming a convoluted and tangled mess.
All in all, I really enjoyed this project BECAUSE of the tricky constraints instead of DESPITE them!