Amberlea Williams and her debut picture book, The Bee Without Wings My debut author-illustrated book The Bee Without Wings published on March 21st from PAPress/Chronicle Books! The inspiration was sparked by an article about a woman who found a wingless queen bumblebee in her garden. On its own the bee wouldn’t have survived, but with her care, it lived for a number of months, and they seemed to share a mutual bond which was really sweet. There’s something deeply heartwarming and inspiring about an interspecies friendship, especially when it involves an animal that isn’t typically thought to be affectionate, like a bee. This idea of a person helping and befriending a wingless bee stuck in my mind, and wouldn’t let go, and over many months and years became a book! Very early notes and ideas. When an idea first takes hold, I try to get everything down on paper - sketches, notes, words, colour palette ideas, facial expressions - without censoring any of my thoughts, just get it all out of my head. I also fall down rabbit holes of research—in this case everything related to bees—their life cycle, what flowers they like, how a bee could be born without wings (deformed wing virus), etc, etc. Then I try to see if any of these tiny scraps fit together and can be fleshed out into a storyline—most of them won’t fit or make sense, but it’s all part of diving into the story and seeing where it could go. The story slowly builds, and changes, and evolves. An equally important part of the process is when I’m not working on it directly, knowing my brain is still thinking about it, and then coming back to it with fresh eyes (the ol’ ‘magic drawer’ trick). I find I need to “see” the story take shape, so I start laying out my thumbnails and very rough sketches in InDesign (the graphic designer in me gets excited about choosing the font, page size, etc, because those are all a part of creating the right tone). I work back and forth between images and words, making sure each helps the other, and isn’t redundant, and try to make effective use of the page turn. After I had worked through many versions, I got a professional critique from Jean Pendziwol, and her keen insights and feedback really helped me tighten the story and get it ready for submission. For the final illustrations I scanned my sketches and composed them in Photoshop, making sure they would work in black and white first, then creating a colour plan. I painted in layers of watered down gouache, then added texture and details with pencil crayon. For some of the illustrations I scanned painted textures and added those in Photoshop. Pencil sketches, loose colour plan in Photoshop, scanned textures, and beginning to lay down layers of gouache. Rough pencil sketch. Rough paint (it was only later, with my fantastic editor Rob Shaeffer that the kitty, Molly, became a more central character and was added to more of the illustrations). Final illustration. I was thrilled when the publisher said that we could add some backmatter, because I love research! There are lots of books out there about bees in general, but I wanted to focus on bumblebees in early spring. It’s only mated queen bumblebees that hibernate. So if you see a bumblebee very early in the spring, it is likely a queen, and she’s got a lot of work to do getting fueled up, finding a new nesting site, and laying her eggs. People can greatly help bees by delaying the cleanup of their garden, allowing dandelions to grow, and planting native wildflower species. I’m very much a novice gardener, but I'm hoping someday I’ll be a font of gardening wisdom. I’ve got some wildflower seeds I’m very excited to plant that I hope will attract a lot of bees and butterflies.
Amberlea Williams is an illustrator, graphic designer, and yoga teacher living in Ottawa. Her debut picture book, A Bee Without Wings, was released on March 21, 2023. Comments are closed.
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