Why Don't You Have Borders for Boys?

There are so many answers for this, but the best one is that I haven't found a design suitable to put out.

Believe me, it's not because I haven't tried. The first set of borders included ballerinas for girls and astronauts for boys (pictured above). The repeat just didn't work, and I couldn't figure out how to make it better, so I left it out of production.

I tried later with another artist -- a young brother, probably about 19 or 20. He wasn't a professional artist and hadn't done commercial work before. He contacted me by email and said that he was interested in doing a border. Once I received his samples, I ran them by Angel to get a second opinion.

He had a very different style. His art at first glance may have offended some because he used oversized heads, lips, and noses. But there was just something about his work that I liked. I couldn't quite figure it out. I guess that his art embraced "us." You could just tell that it came from love for his people. Angel agreed, so I went ahead and met with him.

We looked at a few possibilities, one of which was a basketball border. I liked the art, but there are just certain ways that it needs to be presented in order to get it in shape for production. First, you have to start out with a draft -- a VERY rough sketch in pencil. From there you work in pieces, figuring out colors, placement, size, etc. Maybe his age -- the impatience of it -- caused him to jump straight to a final draft, every single time.

Every time we met, he came with a full fledged work of art. So when I'd say, "We need to pull these closer together," or "The background needs more definition," or anything else that you work on in pre-production, he got highly pissed. Looking at me like, this-is-my-art-and-I'm-not-changing-it. Period. So that relationship never worked out. We never got past that hurdle. All I wanted was a rough draft that we could manipulate and massage until it became what I needed. He wanted to give me what he wanted me to have, and it unfortunately doesn't work like that when you are designing for a client. So there the basketball border went... down the drain.

I tried to get a piece from another very talented young man, but he never got around to doing a sketch. He was in college, and had much more on his mind than drawing a wallpaper border. (It really isn't the most exciting thing, when you think long and hard about it.

I wrote a letter to an amazing children's book illustrator about doing a border, but never received a response. About six months later, his work ended up on a border for another company. The exact same scene from the exact same book that I mentioned in my letter to him. It was a double-page spread from a book that I'd read to my daughter every night for months. (You know how they get stuck on a book and want you to read it over and over until they get stuck on something else?) I never figured that out, but I really haven't tried to. I just chalked it up as a lesson learned. If God had wanted it to happen, it would have happened. I guess there was just another path that I was supposed to walk.

After all of that, I finally came across Don Tate's art. He's the artist who did "Sunrize Kidz" and "Kidz of Color." The borders didn't feature boys alone, but I had finally found some nice looking black boys in an attractive, colorful border. I figured that they could be used for either a boy's room or a girl's room (or for a playroom , a sister and brother who share a room, a daycare center, or a school), so I put them into production.

There's still a void, I know. I have a 13-year-old son, and there's nothing culturally relevant, intellectually stimulating, or uplifting out there to decorate his room with. We still have the younger age groups to deal with, too.

I didn't mean to write a book. I just wanted everyone to know that I haven't left the boys out on purpose, and that I'll keep you posted as work on this progresses. It would be really nice, though, to have some input.

The question that guides me is: "What do I want my son to see on his walls when he wakes up in the morning?"