Latest Work: Cover for Cobblestone Magazine, October 2013

My latest work just hit the newstands... the October cover for Cobblestone Magazine: Valley Forge, The Real Story.

Cobblestone is an American History magazine for young people.

I was pleased when the designer for Cobblestone asked me to do a cover about Valley Forge. I'd already done research about VF when I worked on "The Black Regiment of the American Revolution."

The focus for this illustration was on 17-year old Joseph Plumb Martin. He marched into Valley Forge with the Continental Army in 1777, and it is believed that he kept a journal of his experiences. At the age of 70, he wrote his memoirs, considered the best first-person account of the life of a private soldier in the Revolutionary War.

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©Cheryl Kirk Noll, "Black Regiment of the American Revolution."

Illustration Friday # 27: TRIBUTE

This week, I'm posting an older piece for the Illustration Friday "Tribute" prompt word.

This is a CD cover I did for Rochel Coleman, a professional storyteller who has lived in Providence. His uncle was one of the historic Tuskegee Airmen, black pilots who flew combat missions over Africa and Europe in WWII, and one of the stories that it tells is a tribute to these men, who broke racial barriers.

On a related note, I recently read an interesting YA book by Sherri L. Smith titled "Flygirl." It was about a young black woman who "passed" (as white) in order to serve in the Women's Airforce Service Pilots during WWII.

IF # 25: TRAIN

I didn't manage to post the piece I worked on for this weeks Illustration Friday on time, but here it is. My thinking... you must TRAIN your eye to become an artist.

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© Cheryl Kirk Noll, watercolor and colored pencil

I started this some time ago, but I reformatted it, reworked the main character and added some details. It is for a project I'm working on with my friend Linda. The story takes place in France in the 1880's.

A book about Mom to Learn InDesign

Last spring, I decided to take a class in InDesign at RISD Continuing Education with Bryan Rodrigues. I loved it, and dummied up a few of the children's books I've been working on. Our big assignment was to do a book with 100 pages, so I decided on a scrapbook sort of project, and limited it by focusing it on my mom.

I had no idea how involved the project would become, or how much fun it would be to learn about my own family history, from the late 1800's to present.

In class, Bryan had us set up a book using a Blurb template. I chose a 9 x 12 size, and planned chapter layouts, formatting styles for headings, text, and captions. If you've used Adobe programs, InDesign is relatively intuitive, but there's nothing like having weekly instruction, followed by assignments to put what you've learned into practice. Bryan made it all seemed so easy!

One of my favorite pages was a montage of my mom modeling for Century Club. The pictures here span from 1976-2011... 35 years. She hasn't changed much, has she?

Mom modeling over the years

My niece helping Grandmom sort

family slides a few years back.

At home, I started by editing some of the 700 slides from our childhood that Mom had converted to digital a few years ago. I scoured the many scrapbooks I've kept over the years. During phone calls to Mom, I "slyly" asked about some of the old family stories we'd heard a million times, to make sure I had them right.

I didn't! What a surprise to hear the details of stories I thought I knew. I wrote them down, and started a hodgepodge text document.

A page in progress...

with lorem ipsum and lots of ????'s

Family photos from the 1920's

The book wasn't complete enough to give to Mom by the time my class ended, but it was chock-full of lorem ipsum (fake type used for placement) and photos that I'd scanned and formatted. By August, it felt like it was pulling together, but the text was nowhere near complete, so I made a PDF file and "gave" it to my mom for her 86th birthday.

Pictures from 1940

Happily, she was thrilled. From that time on, Mom and I collaborated on the text and captions. She searched her records for dates and details, and corrected my "gazillions" of mistakes. I collected some of her scrapbooks and photographed pages from others.

I began to turn to resources from other members of my family. My cousin, Jack Eiser, had continued the genealogy work his sister Joyce began, and I was able to access Rowe and Grant family trees on ancestry.com, complete with census records, birth certificates and more. (Thanks, Jack)

 I'd collected family reminisces over the years, and I pulled anecdotes from those. When Mom didn't remember details from her childhood, she called her sister and brother and gathered their memories. Not surprisingly, they often saw things through different prisms.

Photos from the 70's!

At Thanksgiving, Mom and I went through the text and trolled for missing pictures and information. My husband told me firmly that I needed to finish this never-ending project in time to have it printed for Christmas. I started working fifteen hour days, and for a few days, the project wasn't fun, with color conversions and uploading, spell checks, missing dates, and a deadline.

But then, miraculously, it was finished! One hundred pages, over 500 photographs, and a permanent record of my mom's history.

It was oh, so satisfying to see it arrive at Mom's as a hard-cover book, and to see the look on her face when she opened it at our Christmas celebration.

Of course, this project only whet my appetite for more. There are still so many photos! And there's still my dad's side of the family to explore!!!

Traveling through History

Since I do a lot of historic and multicultural illustration, I like to get a little taste of history now and then. So, I jumped at the chance to spend the day with a friend and tour Great Road in northern Rhode Island,  touted as America's first "Super Highway."

The tour, organized by

Tour Rhode Island

,  ran like clockwork, and the guides were top-notch.  We saw the Eleazer

Arnold House

, a "stone ender" built in 1693, the oldest home in Lincoln, RI.

The stone of the "stone-ender" has been covered with a lime slurry, true to the time period.

The caretakers have taken this house back to it's original form, leaded windows and all.

Hearthside House was a special  treat, with costumed docents in every room to tell us the sad and romantic story behind this 1810 fieldstone home.

Our docent, Estelle, jumped at the chance to portray the African-American woman who worked for the Talbot's, and lived with her husband on the third floor. We heard that cooks gauged the temperature by how long they could stand to hold their arm above a fire.

Later residents of Hearthside had an African-American couple who worked for them and lived in the house.

Looms original to the house have just been brought back from a museum in Lowell.

Thirteen children are currently training to be docents at Hearthside.

The fellow in the foreground did a great job.

 The clothes were amazing. This little boys outfit was from the time period when the middle class began to emerge. Children went from being dressed as little adults, to little sailors. Everything, of course, is hand stitched.

A boy's jacket.

This one made me drool.

A close-up showing hand-embroidery, including straw and horsehair.

 We also saw a working blacksmith shop (

Hannaway Blacksmith Shop

, built in 1880), with a woman working the bellows, the

Saylesville Friends Meeting House

, in continuous use since 1704, and a museum about the Blackstone Canal housed in the Captain Wilbur Kelly House.

Captain Kelly was a sea captain on a ship with a name familiar to Rhode Islanders, the Ann & Hope. Mill owners invested in a canal that was built from Providence to Wooster. It ran from 1828 until 1848, when the new transportation craze, the train, put it out of business.

The Valentine Whitman house, and more incredible clothes.

The attic of the V-W house, built in 1694, and also a "stone-ender."

Thanks to my friend, Helen, for a great Cinco de Mayo!!!

Illustration Friday # 19: SWAMP

© Cheryl Kirk Noll,  Harriet Tubman escapes slavery

I've been SWAMPed this week with a wonderful weekend conference, a niece getting married, and family visiting from the other coast. So here is an older piece, done for a set of story cards for Graphic Learning, a Divison of Abrams & Co.,  many years ago, illustrating Harriet Tubman escaping from slavery through a SWAMP in Maryland.