This book is about two lonely 9-year-old girls who fortuitously become friends by scratching messages to each other into an old wooden park bench. In the end, while they cannot currently spend time together anymore because of the pandemic, they find a reason to hope. The illustrations contain no people and only represent the setting of each page, creating a stage for anyone to put themself into the story.

The illustrations I put together for Bench Friends are digital collages of my Remainder Pour project. It was exciting to contain the abstract imagery into hard edged line drawings, as I brought the story to life. Because of this process of creating illustrations, each image for Bench Friends has an ancestry of other paintings connected to it through the materials used.