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Printed & Published by
Moorleys Ltd, September 2024
"Digging in the garden a curious fox
Finds a rusty old tin, a small treasure box"
This was the book that I never planned to make! Yet here we are: my first ever picture book without words. As the author's note explains (at the end of this book), the tale began life as a story calendar for 2025.
After the interior scenes of the dolls house and all the brightly coloured bears from the year's previous calendar, I knew I wanted to get outside and start exploring landscape scenes. The idea initially began with thoughts of old trinkets and toys, as I sat gazing at my Christmas tree on Christmas Eve 2023. Each year the latest tree showcases an ever expanding collection of hanging figures. Whether they have been bought as gifts or passed down from family members, each decoration holds a special memory, which feeds into the seasonal nostalgia. The idea that each object encompasses a special kind of magic started to take hold of me.
I was thinking about the way we all pack away those special decorations and memories each year, and the process of opening those boxes up again the following year. So many of us enjoy the task of decorating for Christmas because we love to revisit those important memories, which of course, are completely unique to every one of us. I think the fact that they are packed away allows us to carry on with life, so there's always a little comforting magic when we return to them.
The character of the fox started to spring to life in my mind as I was contemplating the "box". As well as an obvious rhyme, I could visualise a curious fox digging in a garden and discovering something that wasn't his evening meal!
Once that connection was made I started imagining the kind of objects which might have been collected by somebody long ago, and placed in this special box, safely buried in a spot that nobody would think to look at. There it was again, that time machine that enables me to travel back to my childhood, and remember what it was like to collect all kinds of "treasures".
I immediately remembered by favourite jewellery box which had a musical ballerina, who would twirl around in front of the mirror (once you'd wound up the mechanism and opened the lid). I still find music boxes magical and ever so slightly creepy, which was exactly the kind of tone I wanted to set for this story.
From there, I remembered other objects from my childhood home: a pink elephant money box, my grandmother's collection of brooches, a tiny broken porcelain rabbit, the faded plastic Father Christmas (that came out every year to sit on top of my mother's homemade cake)...so many memories scrambling to the forefront of my mind.
I loved the idea of the fox watching each figurine come alive, following them with a friendly and sometimes slightly predatory posture. The character of the fox represented us, the viewer, as we watch with curiosity where the treasures move to. I decided quite early on that I would use my own garden as a starting point, mainly as an easy way to reference various scenes and plants as they occurred to me. As the work developed, I realised I liked the idea of the story taking place in one garden. The idea that the treasures belong somehow to this special place, and maybe shouldn't be moved elsewhere. With this in mind, the fox also has this intuition, and therefore doesn't interfere or take any of the objects away. Instead he carefully re-buries his discovery, perhaps with the intention to return another day.
As I mentioned earlier, this was only ever meant to be a calendar, designed to take you through each month of 2025. This is why the scenes are set in daytime, as well as nighttime, simply to show the changing seasons of the various plants and flowers. Aside from the introduction, I also felt that text wasn't necessary - it was clear what was happening in each illustration.
With the artwork developing and my connection to the characters growing, I realised that this story deserved more than to be discarded after the year of 2025.
It was all very well deciding to make "Box of Treasures" into a book, but you've got to remember that I had been working to one format specifically designed as an image for an A4 wall calendar. Therefore this actually required a lot of planning and extra work to make the story work as a picture book. After various scribbles and headaches, I came to the conclusion that I needed to keep the story simple and focus on what I'd already created. Once I realised that it really was simply about a fox's discovery of a tin box in a garden, the images leading up to and after this came to me more easily. The trouble was, this story could have gone on and on down many different path ways, which is why I found it slightly daunting to suddenly create a whole picture book. However, sometimes with creative ideas, you have to lean in to your intuition and try to go with what feels right. This is why "Box of Treasures" became a story without words, inviting you in to the quiet garden with the silent fox. We are all discovering a little mystery and magic together here, which may make you think of your own childhood memories and various trinkets which have a significant hold over you alone. There aren't always words to describe why certain possessions mean so much to us. Their true value often lies with the memories attached...and there is a deep magic to be found there.
Box of Treasures is available to buy from my online KerryDIllustrations Etsy shop, follow the link above.
Each book comes in a handmade heavyweight card box sleeve and is signed and gift wrapped.
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