Thoughts about my book My Garden - Beauty Above, Wonders Below began with the beautiful intaglio prints created for a much earlier book, A Child's Enchanted Garden, which spoke to the garden’s beauty above ground. These illustrations inspired me to consider a book dealing with the wonders below ground.

 

I learned about the potential for producing digital collages on the computer while working on of my recent book, Drawn into the Garden. Until then, I had created only traditional collages using physical materials – paper, paints, and photographs. The idea of combining very traditional and cutting-edge computer approaches was intriguing  to me, offering many new possibilities.

 

For me, this is an entirely different way of illustrating. After my friend, Stefan Cremers, digitally reproduced the prints and new oil paintings we combined the images together on the computer with Photoshop. 

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This book project took almost three years to complete. Each image consists of many layers.

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Below you can see an example combining prints and paintings.