How do Ideas become Images?

Telling Stories to Trees, watercolor illustration by Rima Staines

A Button House for a Button Mouse, illustration by Rima Staines

I love to read the blog of illustrator Rima Staines. Her writings remind me of how art comes from ideas and ideas from art. Art that inspires us to spend time with it for awhile is rich with ideas.

As she writes in her profile on her etsy shop: "Rima's curiosity leads her through the many worlds of words, languages and lettering, books and stories, puppetry, nature and interesting people, music, superstitions, folklore and fairytales, and most of all the otherness that can be found on the periphery of our lives, the strange and grotesque, the absurd and unnerving ... that topsy turvy in between place where things are not quite what they seem...Rima paints and draws on wood and paper. She enjoys entwining script and image closely and loves to write rhyming stories to tell her characters' tales using forgotten words and other languages."

Her illustrations and the work of other illustrators that she writes about evoke a whole story just in the one sample illustration. They are a glimpse into a vast magical world that we get an invitation to once in while. It reminds me of that game my son plays on the internet that he'll never get to the end of because the game designers keep adding more "worlds". We never get to the end of ideas and stories, so we'll never run out of the magic world of illustrations.

With digital media, our students don't really tap into the magic until after they've gotten a good handle on the technology. But once they do, it is very exciting. I plan on posting regular "When Magic Happens" examples of students and include their description of where their idea came from (if they can articulate it).

Until then, I hope you spend some time with Rima's blog. I think it will give you lots of ideas.