Helloooooo my Beautiful Butterflies!!!
Remember when I shared some behind-the-scenes photos of the upcoming book I illustrated? I believe it was last fall that these pics found your way to your inbox (sooo much has happened for me since then so I'm fuzzy on the exact month I shared this).
Anywho, I'm coming at you with an exciting announcement: The ABCs of Grief is officially available for purchase! EEEEK!!!!
Thank you to everyone who purchased during the pre-order last fall and to those of you who have sent me such kind messages! This book was truly a labor of love. I started working on this project about a year ago and have since experienced a very wild year personally. I won't dive too far into it (you can read more about it on my Instagram post here), but suffice it to say this book helped me process what I was experiencing while making the illustrations.
This book, written by Jessica Correnti of Kids Grief Support teaches little ones how to understand and process what Grief is using the Alphabet. Her beautiful words express the universalness of grief and also how grieving can be for truly anything under the sun (death, illness, friendship, divorce, and the list goes on). She also teaches us that everyone's experience of grief is different and unique. This book is made for kids, but truly I think every adult could benefit from reading this too.
You can buy your copy here.
I shared some behind-the-scenes pics of the illustrations last fall, but now that the book is out I wanted to share a few more photos of the making of the illustrations and the finished product.
I hand-drew all of the sketches on my iPad, then transferred them to watercolor paper to be hand-painted.
I kid you not when I say that my desk was filled to the brim with illustrations for this book.
When I was all finished illustrating, I scanned in the paintings and formatted them on my computer for printing. Sounds like a small task, but formatting took a whole month of back and forth between me and the author, adding in lettering, and getting all of the settings just right for printing.
Receiving my copy in the mail was such an amazing experience!!! When you put in so much work into something, seeing the final product is utterly surreal; especially comparing the printed page to the original illustration.
I hope you enjoy this book as much as I do. Remember you can buy your copy here.
Until next time,
Rachel
