A collection of heartfelt poems accompanied by charming illustrations, Reverie is an earnest exploration of the world’s enchanting beauty and the human experience through the lens of non-verbal autism. Vinay Lingampalli’s sincere poetry shares themes of perseverance, love, appreciation, and more, with a profound focus on the positive side of life.
My brother requested for me to illustrate accompanying images for each of the 20 poems. However, I was only given a week to do this, so that we would have enough time to send the book for printing. This way we could receive copies in time for our trip to India, and be able to share his accomplishment with our family.
This meant that I had to come up with ideas and execute them within 9 days -- around 3 drawings per day, balanced with my courseload of 4 classes (18 units), 2 jobs, and 4 clubs 😩. Fortunately, my immense, expanse, and immeasurable love* for my brother gave me enough motivation to create the drawings and design the book!
* Inside joke
Here are a few of my favorite poems and illustrations accompanying them (check out the book on Amazon to read all of them!):
I would be lying if I said that I didn't feel frustrated with my concepts at times or felt like the drawings weren't working out — at which points I turned to Pinterest or Adobe Firefly (generative AI) to help come up with ideas. Some of the poems were very abstract, so it was difficult to figure out how to visually represent them, but seeing different compositions and photography helped immensely in varying my pieces.
In the end, I was able to finish in time and I'm happy with how it turned out! The art style I chose to complete the drawings in allowed me to not only complete the art quicker, but maintain a semblance of abstract fleetingness, which I felt matched the imaginative poems.