Taking a small folktale and turning it into a larger stry was a great exercise to get my mind and drawing hand wrapped around how to translate something from the page into visuals. My reimagining of Coyote as a trailer park bum and Old Turkey as a sweet old grandma was my first stint of inspiration. When I realized I wanted to tel a story that rhymed, like a children’s storybook, I realized I was in for an even deeper challenge!

Most of our trees were skinny enough to be constructed out of a packing tube base or even a simple dowel rod, but some had to be massive to sell the scale of an old-growth forest. I carved these large tree trunks by cutting a MDF (medium-density fiberboard) templates, covering it with aluminum tape on the edges, and using them as a guide to cutting the shape out of 12″ diameter foam cylinders with a hot wire.

Most of our trees were skinny enough to be constructed out of a packing tube base or even a simple dowel rod, but some had to be massive to sell the scale of an old-growth forest. I carved these large tree trunks by cutting a MDF (medium-density fiberboard) templates, covering it with aluminum tape on the edges, and using them as a guide to cutting the shape out of 12″ diameter foam cylinders with a hot wire.