From paintings to puzzles

Collaborating with Eeboo

I’ve always admired the New York-based company Eeboo as a sustainability-focused, women-owned, mother-run company, so I was happy to be asked to illustrate some of their products. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a memory-and-matching game, a jigsaw puzzle, a set of tiny journals, and some more cute things coming out next year. Each one has been so fun to make.

The lovely team at Eeboo gave clear briefs based on the imagery they liked and lists of things to sketch out. I am in my happy place when doing lots of drawing and generating ideas.

I worked on all the drawings for this project over a few Saturday mornings while my daughters were in their groups. I’d grab a coffee and sit in the Lit and Phil, a beautiful library in Newcastle, and sketch. Sometimes things flow so well in the right environment.

I filled many pages in my sketchbook, drawing detail when needed with my Sakura mechanical pencil and keeping things fairly loose and quick with my much-loved blackwing pencil.

Once the final sketches were selected, I’d lay them out in Photoshop and print them off, ready for the lightbox and painting.

Though I love painting by eye, my trusty lightbox is a handy tool when time is tight, and page/product dimensions have to be accurate. It’s a hefty Artograph Lightpad that’s had many years of use.

Photo credit copyright Éva Németh 2024

I thought it was such a nice idea of Eeboo’s to show the fairy cottage changing through the seasons. You know how I love to paint a tiny house!

I used traditional gouache, various colour pencils, neocolour pastels and drawing ink.

I share a lot of my technical process and the materials that I use in my craft book, Painting Nature, with Quadrille (Penguin Random House), if you would like to learn more.

In some of the art, I painted the background first, and then added the foreground. I usually do this when I want a particular background colour, then choose foreground colours to harmonise.

Twenty-five paintings and quite a bit of creative chaos later, it was time to move on to the iPad, where I finished up all the little details and made sure the colours were clear.

I try to add as much detail and texture to my paintings before scanning, but sometimes Procreate is the best way to refine those tiny end details.

process and progress

So much tiny world, fairy joy!

I love all the extra attention to detail in Eeboo products, and it was satisfying to work on decorative borders for the game and journals.

The cherry on top is receiving a fully formed product with all the special touches that you expect from Eeboo.

We have a small selection in our shop now (thank you to everyone buying already - there’s not much left!), or if you are in the US, order directly from Eeboo.