Stuff - Illustration Friday - Homage

I want to recognize my namesake and honorary aunt, Isabelita.

She was born in the Amazon region of Peru, lived a few blocks from a rocky beach near Lima when she married, and visited the Andes region with my family and me when she was in her late 70s, walking around in her HIGH heels. (She refused to buy tennis shoes!)

The first time that she came to Washington D.C area was with her husband, who had Hodgkin's disease and received mercury treatments at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was able to go there, because he was an officer in the Peruvian Navy. She didn't speak a word of English, didn't like segregation, and was not used to the cold winter. She returned to Peru a widow and raised two children, without the help of her closest, older relatives, since they all died within a two year period.

She loved to travel, write letters, and talk politics. She died in the early 1990s.

For her dress, I used watercolors and pasted an old library card catalog for the hem. I found an old Polaroid with the inked word que, whch means what, and a map to represent her travels.

I used different colored pencils to demarcate the three geographic regions of Peru, which she managed to see in her lifetime. I found a photo of rocks and glued it on the blue region from an old map. I cut brown paper to represent the Amazon river and glued a frog stamped on a sheer fabric. I drew the little leaves with my new calligraphy pen. Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu a mountains are represented by the funny peaks; they are actually stamps gone badly, so I cut what I needed.