Sina the Bear lived quite peacefully in the forest. He couldn't complain, afterall he had small insects, fruits, and other easy-catching things that he could eat. Until everything changed.
This was also a book that I illustrated and painted under the art direction of Hanan Armali, the writer and the owner of Razi's World. You can find more about Hanan's work by clicking here.
Sina, the main character.
I feel that I should share a little background about me if I'm to speak about the process of creation of this book.
I was, for the most part of my life, someone that wasn't actually really "social". I do love people, and the adult me learned how much I love learning with other people - but the kid me spent so much time learning things in the peace of home, alone, sometimes even skipping classes at school to be at home reading and drawing.
We barely notice when we are growing up that there are other people involved in everything we learn, even when we don't interact with other people.
There's history in the books we use to learn anatomy or colors. There's no such thing as self-taught, because we were always taught by someone - regardless if we were the ones taking the steps to find more about what we want to learn or if it was a teacher guiding our steps in this search. We grow together.
And this books talks about it.
In this book, I took the freedom to add some symbolisms when sketching and painting - like the glowy butterfly that leads our main character to the cave that would tell his ancestors story.
The butterfly is a symbol of growth and new beginnings. There's some hard work to achieve it, but the process is natural and intuitive. We must rely on our abilities and we must trust ourselves, but there's always a little bit of doubt to spice things up before we can finally say "YEAH YAY I DID IT".
It was my last touch to the book, and I remember realising that it was the detail that made the book much more special.
I hope you liked reading a little bit more about my process, and thank you for reading until here!
