Watercolor: A Quiet Conversation Between Mind and Soul
April 22, 2025
From Tree-Women to the Tree of Life — My Personal Approach to Children’s Book Illustration
When a child opens a picture book, they often see the illustration before they ever read a word.
For years, I’ve tried to make that first visual encounter plant something—a feeling of warmth, safety, curiosity, or even a quiet recognition.
Because to me, illustration is not just drawing. It’s storytelling through presence, symbols, and emotion.
Children’s book illustrations are not just decorative; they are narrative in themselves.
As Maurice Sendak once said:
“You must find the space in the text where the pictures can do something that the words don’t do. You are always in service to the text—but never just illustrating it. Pictures should magnify and interpret, not mirror the words.”
That’s what I try to do—illustrate not what is written, but what is felt.
In many of my works, you’ll find women who are also trees—rooted in the soil, their arms branches, their hair woven with fruit or flowers.
These are not just aesthetic choices. They are symbols of motherhood, fertility, ancestral strength, and peace.
The Tree of Life, found in many ancient Iranian cultures, represents not only vitality but the bridge between earth and sky.
When a child sees such imagery, even without understanding the full context, they feel something rooted and real.
A silent connection. A myth whispered through color.
In my illustrations, I incorporate Iranian architecture, traditional textiles, symbolic patterns, and ancient motifs.
Not as background, but as active storytelling elements.
The curves of a turquoise tile, the folds of a Kurdish dress, the geometry of a Persian carpet—they all speak.
And when a child sees these familiar yet magical forms, they feel:
“This story belongs to me. I know this place.”
As Bruno Munari wrote in Design as Art:
“When the things we use every day and the places we live in become so well designed that they become works of art themselves, then we can say we have achieved balance in life.”
I believe illustrations can do the same: turn storybooks into spaces of beauty and harmony.
I often paint children who grow from branches, or mothers who cradle their children like fruit—nourishing, grounded, eternal.
Through these images, I hope to foster a sense of belonging, empathy, and quiet strength in young readers.
Illustration, for me, is not just about visual appeal.
It’s about opening a window for the child—to see not only the world, but themselves, differently.
When I create an image, I don’t just want it to be beautiful.
I want it to be rooted—in memory, in cultural heritage, in the child’s own imagination.
I hope that my images become bridges—between tradition and fantasy, between child and nature, between past and possibility.
And if one day, a child looks at one of my trees and says,
“I feel like I am that tree,”
then I know the picture has reached their soul.
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