Beth Anderson, Children's Writer

Face to Face with Clara Barton by Christopher Cyr

Thank you, Beth, for this opportunity to reveal my process.

Bringing to life any illustration is a magical process. Illustration is art that communicates, tells stories, and is crafted to engage the viewer.

TO THE FRONT! Clara Barton Braves the Battle of Antietam by author Claudia Friddell brings the reader along with Clara Barton as she courageously helps others on a Civil War battlefield. When this project came to me, I knew this was something special. And as Clara herself was such an important emotional core to the story, I knew how I portrayed her was going to go beyond simple imagination on my part.

I normally start any project with sketches or quick thumbnail paintings (so named because they often are quite small, an inch or two at most in size). As I began to work out the images, I knew that Clara herself was going to be the key in many of my paintings.

There are not many photos or images of Clara Barton from the time that this book takes place, and that proved to be a real challenge for me. I deeply researched as much visual reference as I could find, but I knew that in order to create a consistent likeness, I needed to truly see her.

Unexpected challenges are common in any profession, and being an illustrator is no different. While it had been my intention to find someone of a moderate likeness to Clara to pose for me, I needed to begin work on this during the complete quarantine lockdown in my area due to the Covid-19 pandemic. I scaled back and reworked my ambitious plans. I found how to make do with what I had available to me and used my technical imagination to fill in the gaps. Most importantly, though, I got out an old box of oven-bake clay and created a small, sculpted bust of Clara as I best imagined her to be at that time. Working back and forth from the images I had researched and the sculpt I created, I felt like I could see Clara in front of me.

Using blankets, clay, and my phone precariously perched at odd angles, I was able to create for myself a bare-bones set of reference material that would help me illustrate Clara. But I also gained something else, a small tiptoe in Clara’s shoes, an invaluable exercise in helping to bring her emotion to the page.

My artwork is digital painted in Adobe Photoshop, but I see my process as a very non-digital one. I construct, I re-enact, I push and pull paint around the canvas. Face to face with Clara Barton, I felt a bit less like an illustrator than I normally do and more like a time traveler with a camera ready to show the world her story.

Don’t forget to leave a comment below for a chance to win a copy of TO THE FRONT! CLARA BARTON BRAVES THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM. (US addresses)

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