This being my last year in University has made me really think about what I want to achieve in my near future. I've always wanted to do children's book illustration, but thinking about my young life really has pushed me to want to share it with the rest of the world. I'm from such a small place that barely anyone knows about, and only a handful of people come from. It's a truly a special place, and I love it, and my family. My father's profession really shaped my outlook on life, and nature and how precious it is to my family and me.

 

It may sound boring, a little girl growing up on a small island on her own, no TV and no video games. All we had was the sea, the nature and the cool salt water air. I had much to do, and I was never bored. My aunts and uncles also had cottages in Clark's Tickle, and every morning at 4 am I would run up the boardwalk to Uncle Edwards and Aunt Debbie's house to sleep until my parents came home from fishing. I have so many stories to tell, from what little fish I would find in the pools when the tide would fall in the tickle, to the beaver we would visit on the hill whom we dubbed "Billy the beaver", to the family of foxes that lived in the remains of George Henry Whitley's famous house on Bony Island, where the cod fishery on the Lower north Shore started. We picked blackberries, cloudberries, partridgeberries, and made jams, cakes and pies out of them, just like in the olden days, we had to live off the land, and it was glorious. I keep telling myself if I ever got my children's book started and published that I would never run out of stories to tell, and that's the truth.

 

Well here I will show you all some of my sketches and doodles that I've done over the spring and summer, I'm still working on the style but you will get the main idea of what it will probably look like. After I finish my studies I plan on moving to Newfoundland, somewhere that I have always associated with and obviously close to home. I hope to get this children's book, Clark' s Tickle, completed after my schooling here in Lennoxville, it will be only a glimpse for the world to see, because the actual memories are priceless in my mind.

 

Drawings by Lori-Lee Thomas: