By the Light of the Moon- A Children's Book Illustration

Here's my latest submission to The Artist Challenge for their current theme "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The painting depicts a frog prince's fanciful dance with the fairy queen under a golden moonlit night sky. This is actually one of eighteen pictures I had designed many moons ago, when I wrote a children's book and illustrated it in college. ( My major was children's book design.) The design has been revised and is once again slowly progressing toward completion.....maybe in a few more moons. The story's focus is based on the landscape of a child's yard and how it comes to have a life of its own while the "humans" sleep. I wanted to give the feeling of being shrunk down to their size and viewpoint, almost a part of their celebration.
At a young age my imagination was very active because I read numerous fairy tales and acted them out with the neighborhood kids. My first sculptures were of elves made out of snow and colored with food coloring. I think my innate connection to the earth has a profound effect on my work.
Recently someone commented on the three basic vantage points creative people tend to look at their world from. Some always view the world as if with a close up lens to their subject matter, almost as with a microscope, others are onlookers from a distance who like to take a wide vantage point view. Still many others like to be close enough, at arms length so to speak. A keen advantage of learning to illustrate books, for me, was that I had to learn to shift the viewers eye from one vantage point to the other, as they turned from page to page, to try to hold their interest.  When I recently looked at my complete works portfolio, I noticed that for a few years as I painted landscapes I shifted to the wide eyed view. As of late, I am doing mostly works at arms length, but my abstract contemporary pieces tend to be moving closer to the the microscopic viewpoints. If you were to take a moment and ask yourself - how do you view your world? Look at the pictures you hang on your walls, do you make little vignettes or setups in your home? Do you like a clean, sparse environment that enables you to easily take it all in at once? Simple lines or details? All of this can help when deciding what type of artwork you really enjoy and would like to have.