Old Ideas

dc127: daily project So many inspiring and amazing and awesome daily projects are abound these days it is for me, a special treat to view a particular group of these, created by my own special in my heart, artist friends in a drawing challenge group that I am fortunate, embrace me.

Each week a volunteer wears the hat of 'host' and chooses a theme for us to explore. At weeks' end [Saturday/Sunday] those who are playing along, do a post on their blog to show what they have created/drawn/photographed/sculpted/written/etc. Here is my offering for this challenge. It is my daily project, long forgotten and abandoned and gathering dust in a corner of my studio. I found it a few days ago.

So I wrote a book it turns out. A chapter book apparently. I'd been doing an exercise from the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I was writing what I called 'the morning pages' every single morning first thing with my first cup of coffee in tow. There was a stack of blank pages and plenty of pencils/pens and more cups of coffee. The idea is to write. Doesn't matter what. Just put pen to paper, and GO! Well it took about three days for me to start writing something that revealed itself to me as the words appeared on the paper. I could not stop. I went for hours at a time, and continued writing as the idea grew. In the end I'd written what I knew to be a children's book but did not know that it was in fact, a chapter book. A librarian/teacher of elementary school friend of mine, told me of this when she read it. At the time I had ideas for this world I'd created on paper, the ideas continued inside of my head. I began sketching and planning out the illustrations for the world I had created. It will be forever LIVE in my memory. Then I abandoned it as life slowly took over, and my chapter book fantasy world came to rest on the shelf and eventually get dispersed and lost in the studio somewhere. Until two days ago when I came across a sketch book filled with ideas.

So here's my contribution. Pidge is a mail delivery pigeon who came to live in a forest edge settlement called The Fairyhedgepig Kingdom run by his daughter who was The Fairyhedgepig Queen. Pidge started a post office in the upper story of a two-story house built at the bottom of a rather large tree which had been abandoned. A cafe called The Blue Willow was situated at the end of Pidge's street under a willow by the stream. This settlement is populated by a hoard of interesting and different 'folk' fairy characters and I won't bore you with the details of the story, but here are some visuals that are a part of it.

From the 'inaugural' opening of Pidge's post office design for the postal cancellation registration, we learn that the book was written in 2005.

Here are some postage stamp ideas. I particularly like the 'Valentine Fairy Hedgepig' stamp and would be using that if I were to post a letter in the FHK itself.

Here are some chapter headings ideas.

Here is a pane of 4 postage stamps featuring a bat but I don't recall his name. His hero it is noted, however, is Batman. The stamps come in denominations of 5 cents, and 3,2 and 1, respectively. There's a drawing sketch of him wearing a beanie hat with one of those propellers on top and the initial "B" also, but the sketch is too faint to photograph well.

I also see a notation in the margins about a bee family called "The Zee"s and headed by a matriarch grandmother named Bea who lives with her grandson named Billy Bob. Bea Zee is quite the gal, it is said.

Well I will leave you here. Hope you had fun with a small visit to The Fairy Hedgepig Kingdom, fondly known as the FHK inside of my imagination.

Who was our host today? Oh she is quite the gal herself. Stefanie! It is such a treat to see what she is up to. Pop by to her spot and see yourself! There you will also be linked to all of the others playing along this week in the drawing challenge.

Thanks for dropping by today and I hope to see you again soon! Hugs, Norma, x