It’s just a ball

© 2021 I know in my heart

This is the line art sketch for the back cover of our book.

The ball balancing on this character’s head was originally a basketball and I never really thought about it much… until we got further along in the book and it just seemed off.

I try to keep this imaginary world familiar but not so much like home that it becomes real. I want it to be whimsical and fantastical because I believe the less like real life it is the more creative it can be and the easier it will be for children to escape into their imaginations. But, necessity does require putting some “real life“ items in the scenes, like a bench or a wheel or a basketball to give the scene the proper context.

But in the case of our back cover, the basketball just seemed out of place. So, I asked Nino to draw something different. And what he came back with was exactly what I was looking for… something we’ve never seen before, but something still familiar… the kind of “ball“ that somebody from another world might play with.

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