Preview Drawing for "Owl and Cat in Love"

I'm back to working on my Owl and Cat in Love book, which will be a re-telling of Leer's poem The Owl and the Pussycat as a wordless picture book. My version has a unique title partially because I'm taking many liberties with the story. Really just using Leer's poem as a jumping off point. One major change is that the cat isn't a pussycat at all. She's a Margay. I wanted to use a wild animal that hunts prey similar to a Great Horned Owl because in my version they first meet while hunting the same rabbit. Margays were a favorite wild cat from my childhood, and because of their smaller size (I didn't want the owl to have a girlfriend too much larger than him) and gorgeous coat I decided to make my Cat a Margay.

These two drawings are done right on the blocks I'm about to start carving. I did them in pencil first and then went over in Sharpie. I normally do drawings on paper first and transfer, but for this set of prints I'm drawing right on the block and then doing four-color reductions. I took these photos and put them together to see how the  composition of this double-page spread would look. (I couldn't just look at the blocks together since the drawings are on either side of the same block.) This is the moment when Owl and Cat first meet, and the image is supposed to convey love at first sight. I think this gets that across, but I honestly can't really see my own work while I'm in the middle of the process. Hopefully in a week I'll be blogging about the final prints, and with the color and expressively-carved marked added those images will be much more powerful.