Jen Eggleston
100 DAYS OF TINY COSTUMES
For my second year of 100 Days Project Scotland, I decided to make an illustrated family tree for my daughter. I wanted her to understand where she comes from, but at the time, she was not quite four years old, so actually “seeing” her ancestors would really help.
I’ve been dabbling in genealogy for years, but scrapped everything and started from scratch again at the beginning of 2021. I now have seven almost complete generations with pretty solid sources and wanted to use the 100 days to pull everything together into one place.
Each day, I drew a picture of a relative, wrote up a little summary of their life, and posted on Instagram.
All the faces were drawn in my sketchbook and scanned, then I organised the layout in Photoshop. Once I had everything set out the way I wanted it, I drew the frames and tree digitally. I also used Calligraphr to make a font out of my own handwriting so I could just type all the words.
The tree goes back to my daughter’s great-great-great-great-grandparents. The frames are coloured for each person’s birthplace – blue for Scotland, red for England, pink for Canada, purple for France, green for Ireland, and orange for Jamaica. Each leaf represents another child from that family.
The project started on June 1 and I posted my final tree on September 8.
