For the 2017 Tomie dePaola Award, Tomie invited SCBWI illustrators to mine their memories for a significant moment from childhood and create a self-portrait that might appear in a picture book.

I’ve included humans in only a handful of cut paper collages, so I saw this prompt as an opportunity to stretch my skills and step out of my comfort zone.

I settled on picking out my first pair of glasses. Here’s my illustration:

The winner and runners-up were announced today. Congratulations to Katya Tabakh for her soft, snow-swept illustration of sledding at night! You can find her submission here.

Diandra Mae, the illustrator coordinator for the Houston chapter of SCBWI, has assembled an online gallery so we can see all the other submissions, too. Stop on by! (My illustration is on this page.)

Thank you to SCBWI and Tomie for this challenge! And thank you, Diandra, for collecting the submissions and sharing them with us!