Sanford Children's Hospital

Yay, it's finally done! Well, here's the first one anyway! This is one of the four pieces that I was commissioned to do for the Sanford Children's Hospital in Sioux Falls, SD. It is a "hidden picture" illustration and will provide a distraction for children in the exam rooms, also known as "high stress areas". The piece itself is only about 12x20 but it will be blown up into a wall covering... it will be very exciting to see how that turns out!

I had done a much simpler "I Spy" illustration a few years back, but nothing compared to this. I don't know in my career up to this point I have ever done anything with such intricate detail throughout. I also had a challenge here of deciding what to hide, how many things, etc... and how would the children know what to look for if there was no key to look off of? I also wanted whatever they had to find to make sense. I love to tell stories through my illustrations, and this is a story of two bears who have come across a treasure chest and are trying to figure out how to open it. So, the logical thing to hide was keys. I put one in each corner of the border so that the children know that is what they need to find. In the illustration there are ten hidden keys. I was worried that I might not have made this challenging enough, but now that I've had four different grown-ups find them with somewhat difficulty, I think I'll be okay!