A New Product

At the end of December I mentioned that I had some exciting projects in hand. I am very happy to be able to reveal one of them now!
Last month a friend, whose son was soon to be celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, called and asked me whether I make personalised albums for parties. I was initially hesitant because I wasn't sure what she wanted but after chatting with her I realised that she was keen on my style of illustration and wanted a simple album decorated with my papercut artwork. After discussing the boy's interests and hobbies I soon set to work and what fun I had!
The Bar Mitzvah boy has many hobbies. He is a keen sportsman and plays basketball and squash amongst other sports. He gained his yellow belt in judo, plays the harmonica and loves riding on his skateboard. It was also requested that I include some appropriate Bar Mitzvah images.
My initial sketch for the cover came together very quickly and I managed to include many of the boy's interests in one little character. Thus we have the skateboarding, squash-playing, harmonica-playing boy in his judo suit, ready for his Bar Mitzvah, wearing the customary tefillin, or phylacteries (from the Ancient Greek phylacterion, meaning "to guard, protect"). I must admit that I got very carried away with the illustration of these tefillin and wanted all the details to be as accurate as possible.
Tefillin are a set of small cubic leather boxes painted black, containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Bible, with leather straps, and worn by observant Jews during weekday morning prayers. One box, wrapped around the arm seven times, is known as the shel yad, literally "for the hand", and the other, laid on the head, known as the shel rosh, "for the head". About a month before his Bar Mitzvah, a boy will receive his own pair of tefillin and is taught and trained about the laying of them. The tefillin are worn on your weaker arm so, after discovering that our Bar Mitzvah boy was left-handed, I put them on his right arm.When my sketch of the boy, along with his name in Hebrew and Bar Mitzvah age, was ready, I scanned it and e-mailed it to my friend. It was at this point that the little turtle was requested. Our boy has a small collection of them and also a couple of pet turtles living in the garden. I then set to work designing some of the inside pages of the album, with the intention of repeating some of the icons from the front cover and using them as individual illustrations inside.
I used the tallit (the Jewish prayer shawl often worn by boys from the age of Bar Mitzvah) as a repeat icon and added a basketball, Torah scroll, tefillin and another cute little turtle into the mix!
Finally, I sprayed the whole album with an acrylic sealer to protect it from sticky fingers at the party and it was ready! The Bar Mitzvah boy apparently loves the album. I had a great time creating it and, after my first experiment, I have a new product to add to the range of work that I offer. Everybody's happy!