The Orange

April 2024 - 3 weeks
Role: Illustration
Poem by Wendy Cope

The Orange is a poem by Wendy Cope about finding great joy in a small thing, aka The Orange. I illustrated three page spreads in the style of a picture book using watercolors and added the text in Adobe Illustrator. The poem’s contrast of a small object, the orange, with big feelings of happiness inspired me to play with the scale of the orange. Watercolor was chosen as the medium to reflect the natural juiciness and texture of the fruit. 

At first, I really struggled with how I wanted to interpret the first-person aspect of the poem. Every iteration I made that had a figure felt too literal to the words and actions described. Instead I chose to only display the orange and objects of the piece such as the shopping cart to have them be interpreted as feelings rather than just objects. The background shapes were inspired by the mixing of the orange and the real life events that made the writer so happy.