The Text I chose and why

The text I chose was a poem by Carl Sandburg called “Theme in Yellow”. It inspired me a lot, because I interpreted it as a pumpkin telling the story of its life during autumn, from growing on a field to being harvested and finally turning into a jack-o’-lantern on Halloween.

//THEME IN YELLOW

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.
_
Halloween is also a special occasion to me, because of the way I celebrate it with my family. When my brother and I were younger, we of course went trick or treating. Nowadays I celebrate with my father by carving pumpkins and watching scary movies and eating American treats like twinkies.

We always buy our pumpkins from a local farmer, as you can see in the pictures below. I think the atmosphere at his farm is also quite magical during October. (photos are from the 24th of October 2021, taken with a smartphone)

The process

Before starting to work on the text and the illustrations, we started to practice our watercolour skills. After that I started to think about what I wanted to show in my illustrations. With the help of mind-maps and moodboards I developed some sketches, that I overlooked again until I had the final illustrations sketched out. Before getting into painting the real thing, I did some colour tests and exercises.

The final illustrations

I started to paint the final illustrations in watercolour and tried to take it as far as possible with this medium. Then I scanned the paintings and edited them in Photoshop, before designing the poster and the spread.

Ex Libris + Bonus

All that was left to do then was the requested Ex Libris. I also did some sketches for that and then decided to go with the jack-o’-lantern design, because it was mentioned in the poem, but I did not exactly show it in my illustrations. After I finalised the Ex Libris in Illustrator, I used the time left to create a little bonus-illustration based on one of my sketches for the Ex Libris, which I really liked, but felt like it did not fit the purpose of an Ex Libris. But it was just too nice, to leave it as a sketch. :D