Maybe you’ve seen this already. A few weeks ago it seems to have made quite the splash on the Internet, but I am just a little too wrapped up in my own mind at the moment to stay abreast of all the good things the Internet has to offer lately. I’ll shake it off shortly.
Illustrator, graphic designer, and fellow Mom to a four-year-old Mica Hendricks made the mistake of opening her crisp, new, mine-all-mine, sketchbook in front of her daughter. What started as the surrendering of a single sketched head to her little one has turned in to one of the coolest and most inspiring collaborations I’ve ever seen.
Mica (who shares her work via her blog busymockingbird) draws from old movie stills, so sometimes you’ll recognize a face face or two abstractly buried in their creations. I want to buy pretty much every single one. (Which, one can, incidentally, in print form, HERE.)
The most amazing part of it all, perhaps, is Hendricks own take-away from the project:
“…When she’d doodle some crazy shape that seemed to go in some surrealistic direction, or put a large circle around the creature and filled the WHOLE THING in with marker, part of my brain would think,What is she DOING?!? She’s just scribbling it all up! But I should know that in most instances, kids’ imaginations way outweigh a grownup’s, and it always ALWAYS looked better that what I had imagined. ALWAYS.
For example, the filled-in marker of the one above, she told me, was a chrysalis, for the caterpillar to transform into a butterfly. Of COURSE it is. I never would have thought of that.”
The caterpillar lady in the chrysalis was my favorite image of the series, and now I know why. Isn’t it awesome? Little minds. So much creativity bursting at the seams.
I had to have one, but I also had to narrow it down to ONLY one, so I went for “Into The Storm” ostensibly for Dee’s room. I can’t wait until it arrives. I may end up absconding with it for our living room gallery wall instead.
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