HAND DRAW WITH EMMA FITZGERALD PROFESSIONAL AUTHOR / ILLUSTRATOR EMMA FITZGERALD HAS SOME GREAT IDEAS THAT COULD BE JUST AS USEFUL FOR AMATEUR BOOK CREATIVES. BY JANE WINGFIELD
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mma FitzGerald started city sketching early in life. When she was a teenager, her family moved from Vancouver BC to the Irish countryside, and she would head into Dublin on the weekends to “walk around and sketch the city as a way to get to know it.” She continued sketching as she traveled and studied, but rarely drew where she was living until she moved to Halifax in 2004. She began with house portraiture, then started sketching every day in her neighborhood. People stopped and talked, telling her stories about what she was drawing. She pitched the idea of making “an adult picture book” at a Word on the Streets, a national book and magazine festival in Canada. An interested publisher worked with her to produce Hand Drawn Halifax, published in 2015. The success of that book led to Hand Drawn Vancouver in 2020, a children’s book, City Streets for City People in 2022, and Hand Drawn Victoria ,scheduled for release in 2024. 46 drawing attention
Emma starts by sketching and taking notes, maybe plotting out neighborhoods, but not attaching herself to preconceived places or a particular plan. As she sketches, ideas evolve. Often people talk to her, telling her stories about what she’s drawing or about their lives. Those stories can be integrated into the text or can lead to another location to sketch. “It’s like an invitation to be open when you go out there and sketch. Your preconceived idea is only half of the process.” It all evolves depending on what happens on the street, she says. Once the sketches are done, “I gather all the images and text together, like collecting little recipe cards,” then she starts determining the progression and design of the book. She advises sketchers to be very sensitive to what they are sketching. Sometimes you need to ask permission of someone or have someone introduce or guide you, especially in a culturally unfamiliar situation.
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