Menu

Two Girls and One Bike

Children's book illustration of two girls wearing Victorian style dresses, one red headed girl and one black girl. The red haired girl is wearing a green dress with white polkadots and is riding a red bicycle. The black girl is wearing a blue plaid dress and riding on the handle bars. The bike is wobbling like it is about to fall over and both girls look scared. In the background is a white picket fence with green bushes and flowers growing behind it. The street is red cobblestones.
Children's book illustration of two girls in an old barn, cluttered with tools and odd pieces of carts, wagons, and building materials. The red haired girl is wearing a green dress and is holding a piece of pipe in one hand and a broom in the other, and looking at the other girl, her mouth open in speech. The other girl is black, and is wearing a blue plaid dress. She is sitting on the floor with paper covered in drawings in front of her. She has a hand to her cheek like she's thinking, and is looking at the red haired girl with a pleased expression on her face.
Children's book illustration showing 2 young girls, about age 8, working with hand tools. One girl has dark skin and curly dark hair and is wearing a blue plaid dress. She is using a hammer to put nails in a cart. Another girl has red hair and is wearing a green dress with white polkadots and a bow at the neck. She is using a saw to cut the end off of a broom. The background is abstract blue, yellow and red streaks, with faint outlines of tools and shelves.
Children's book illustration showing 2 girls riding down a city street on a bike and cart. The cart is home-made from odds and ends found in an old shed, and it attached to the back of the bike. One girl, who is black and wears a blue plaid dress, is standing in the cart, holding the handle, and using her foot to help push her and her friend along. The other girl has red hair and is wearing a green dress with white dots. She is on the bike. The two girls are giving each other a high five as they ride. In the background is a cute bakery with figures visible in the window and a patron sitting at a table outside eating a bun and drinking coffee. There is a park visible down a side street and a woman and child walking along the sidewalk, and a man sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper.

A series of illustrations I created for the SCBWI 2023 Narrative Art competition. The topic for the series was as follows: “In honor of the 120th anniversary of the first successful flight of an airplane (on December 1, 1903), create a sequence of three or four drawings that tell a story of experimentation: the trial and error-perhaps the excitement-of invention.” This is the story I came up with, based on that brief.

My inspiration for this series came from my own memories of playing with my friends as a child, and giving each other rides on the handlebars of our bikes when there weren’t enough bicycles to go around. Unfortunately, we weren’t quite as creative as these girls! Otherwise we might have had a fun cart to ride in too! 

Created digitally in Procreate.