Girl in Woods

The latest volume of Science and Children is out, and I created “Girl in Woods” to compliment Sarah Grace Tuttle’s poem “Feeling the Ground.” She wrote the poem from the point of view of someone with autism spectrum disorder.

When walking through the woods, I am very aware of the sights, smells, and sounds around me. This is partially because of my wilderness training and heightened sense of smell. As an illustrator and scientist, the sensory aspects of nature are plentiful, but I can imagine how they could make someone uncomfortable if they were hypersensitive to them.

Taking the colorful forest and scaling it down to a manageable black-and-white line drawing was challenging, especially since the final illustration would be 1.5 inches by 2.5 inches in the journal.

It was easy to create the forest scene at first. I’ve been on so many hikes in the woods that I can imagine many different paths. The hard part for me was drawing the figure of the girl.

I didn’t have decent reference photos, so I snagged my daughter and headed to a local trail. It was a decent enough day, and we both needed a break from our tasks. Once I found a section of the trail that allowed me to get the right perspectives, I had her pose while I snapped pictures on my phone.

Since my daughter is in her twenties and quite tall, I did some modifications to give younger proportions to the figure. This allowed me to draw a youth that matched the targeted age of the students (grades 6–8) of the teachers who use the journal.

I also played with composition and whether I made the final image position portrait or landscape. I chose the latter to fit the page design used in the past, allowing me to get more forest in the image.

I thoroughly enjoy illustrating the various poems published in the journal and am eager for my next assignment.