illustration for Empathy Day

I was thrilled for Umbrella to have been selected for Empathy Lab’s 2021 guide to children’s books that celebrate Empathy.

I was invited to produce an illustration for this year’s illustrator’ gallery collection.

This was in the brief:

Two years ago, to celebrate Empathy Day and in honour of our wonderful children’s book illustrators, we launched an Empathy Illustrators’ Gallery. We were so moved and inspired by the illustrations we were given, and use them all the time in our work. 

 We’ve decided to make this a building collection and are inviting children’s book illustrators in the 2021 Read for Empathy collection to submit an illustration reflecting their responses to the theme of #ReadForEmpathy, and this year’s theme which is change your perspective – walk in someone else’s shoes. The attached Powerpoint sets this theme in the context of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter.  

Change your perspective, walk on somebody else’s shoes, so there was a lot to get into here so this is how the process went:

To start I wondered who’s shoes were these going to be and could I still draw them? So I drew some well trodden Mr Fox shoes and yes, I could still believe I could draw a shoe, which was a good start.  But I needed to get out of that world and into this one to tap into the current context. So I drew a trainer. But I needed at least another shoe because it is somebody else’s so I drew this very schematic concept of what the illustration needed to do: convey an effective and affective swap that allowed some kind of insight within shoes.

I doodled and brainstormed while drawing to so I started with the obvious: different professions, and thinking about which have been more prominent during the pandemic and which have almost disappeared. I thought about nurses and standup comedians but it was too random and hard to get any purchase, and would they necessarily wear a type of shoe anyway?  So I doodled some dancing, because what is more engaged than two bodies moving and reacting to each other in time? Ah , but how to involve the shoes? I needed to know more about dancing shoes.

While looking into different dancing shoes I came across a term that was very new to me: Pancaking. It has nothing to do with Easter or Pancakes. It is the word that describes applying make up to ballet shoes to make them match the skin tone of the dancer because ballet shoes are mostly available in shades of pink, which suit white legs. In dancing the body makes shapes in time. Those shapes are made by the whole body from the crown of the head to the tips of fingers and toes and visually those shapes are read best when there are no visual interruptions. When the performance required bare legs,  professional dancers of black or brown skin had to spend time in the cumbersome process of pancaking while a white dancer needed only to put their shoes on. 

From here it was clear to me what the illustration needed to do. Two ballerinas of different skin tones swapping shoes and then I though: how does this relate to the pandemic? At the time performance arts was still a long way away and hugging was not advisable. We have all been craving contact and dancers and other performing artists have been craving working and having a live audience. 

In 2018 thanks to a collaboration between dance company Ballet Black and shoe makers Freed of London the first range of pointe shoes toned to match dancers of black, asian and mixed race became available in the UK. Please support their campaign here: 

Scroll to see some of the work in progress images.