Visual Inspiration for Sailing Le Cirque

I promised progress! I spent some time looking around online and created a board on pinterest to collect some images I thought might help me in the next step of this project, which is to visualize how the text might work with the illustrations to tell a more complete story.

pirate ship coloring page

I found this coloring page at a really great website that I will be visiting again to print some pages up for rainy summer afternoons. This is really close to what I was thinking when I tried my hand at this drawing.

I also love the idea of a story book with coloring pages as the art, that would be fun to explore! Maybe a wipe off version vs a paper version though, so kids can read/color it over and over.

I also love stickers that can be colored in. Those are so muh fun that I may have borrowed a page of them from my daughters to decorate the inside cover of my latest journal. I bet that would be another great way for kids to interact with the book.

I found this article on how to draw a pirate ship, so I might use it to get some practice before I try my hand at Le Cirque again.

This dreamy art is a handmade piece I found on etsy. This is how I imagine the lines

leaving as they arrived
With sails slipping by
in the darkness of night

I love the lines, the colors and the way the boat looks like it’s folded out of paper. Maybe a paper boat wouldn’t quite work for this story, but the whimsy is there.

Circus performer juggling with balls on wire

This photo is from this article. 

This is how I imagine the performers of Le Cirque might impress their audience with the lines

then they dance, they prance, pull tricks, entrance
Make fire burn, stand on their hands

The tightrope in particular I pictured strung up between two masts, but after reading about how seasickness is amplified up there and that sailors were often sent up to the crow’s nest as punishment, I am reconsidering.

So I found this on Pinterest and of course it’s a dead link, but I love the action of this image. I can totally picture this as a point of view Mario might have in the final lines of the story

Mario, of the front center seat,
Sailing Le Cirque over waters so deep.

So these are a few ideas for how I might visualize some lines in this book. There are supposed to be waaay more illustrations in a picture book, but this is a good starting point for inspiration.

I don’t really fancy myself as an artist, but I’m compelled to at least give it a try so I can see Le Cirque to completion. Even though I am already working on another project and I don’t plan to query Le Cirque, I’m itching to see it as a more complete final draft. But more than anything else, I’m just dying to read it to the kids and for that I need a physical book. With pictures.