A fellow writer, Jennifer Rogala, asked me to help out on her latest project, a writing contest for local school kids. She asked me to do the artwork for the award certificates. I agreed, figuring I’d do something simple, but when I heard the theme for the contest, “Facing Your Fears”, I had all kinds of ideas.

Heather has been doing some really nice work with colored pencils and digital photography where she composes an image from digital photographs and uses that as a guide for the colored pencil rendering. It’s painstaking work. What I liked about it was that it was perfect for my idea, because I wanted the certificate artwork to have a handmade feel. So I asked her to help me out and she generously agreed.

The idea I settled on was a scary bedroom filled with childhood fears. In the center I placed an empty bed with the shadows of two long arms coming out from underneath. A huge spider is dangles over the bed, and there is a scary clown in a poster over the bed and peeking out from the closet.

I spent about two weeks modeling the room and composing the shot. Once I was done, I produced a rendered image twice the size it would be on the certificate. Heather took that, desaturated it, and printed it out to use as a guide for her work. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the image got clipped when it was printed for her, and now the proportions were off a bit.

Heather worked furiously for the next two and a half days to turn my digital rendering into the hand drawn bedroom in the end result, fixing many small mistakes I’d made She makes it look easy, but it’s a lot of work. When she was done, she scanned the image back in and gave it back to me.

While Heather did her part, I worked on the lettering for the certificate. I fired up Open Office Writer and created a document which would be the template for the final certificates. I put in all the lettering and added input fields for the name of the student and the name of the story.

Here’s the artwork:

Finished poster

Background art for certificate, by Heather

Finished Certificate