Quite Beautiful, Really did not have a glamorous beginning. It was a long neglected domain that Michael purchased after reading the phrase in a book and feeling a connection to it. Initially, he thought to use it as a conduit of getting his artwork/music into the world but as someone who was also busy with a nursing career, there was never the time to do much with it other than renew the licensing.

In the fall/winter of 2019 I was searching for DIY holiday card ideas and with more ambition than practicality, I bought a large amount of card stock. For weeks, it just took up real estate on our shared desk…

Keep in mind that Michael has always had a habit of picking up random sheets of paper or envelopes and doodling or drawing on them. So it wasn’t surprising when he picked up a piece of the card stock and started sketching out the image below, of a child putting a hat on a snowman. I watched this image develop over the next couple of days, as he inked over the pencil sketch, adding here and there, erasing as he went along. The image was smudged with ink when he was finished and you could still see the pencil lines from the original sketch but the result brought a smile to my face when I saw it. There was a warmth that you felt when looking at it. This seemingly simple, no frills, black and white drawing just spoke volumes. It told a story without having to use any words. This image captured every holiday feeling that I was spending hours on Pinterest trying to accomplish. And so with my DIY hopes dashed, I asked him to do a few more, resigned to the fact that my contribution would be the well scripted personal note wishing everyone a “Happy Holiday Season! Much Love, Michael, Shawna & Basil”.

As Michael worked on them over the next few weeks, he would bounce image ideas off me and ask for my opinion, as sketching shifted to inking. Was the composition right? Did it make sense? What should the next one be? We didn’t get much of a response after sending them out into the world. I don’t even remember if we posted them to our social media pages. For us, that wasn’t the point. He was having fun creating them and it was something that we were able collaborate on together.

In January of 2021, we had moved to a new city and I was cleaning the office, in order to finally get it set up. I was sorting a decent amount of artwork that he had finished in the past year during the quarantine, trying to decide what to do with it, how to archive it, or even *gasp* get rid of it. I think it was the first time I remembered seeing the bulk of his art together, all at once, and laid out on the bed. As I was moving pieces into piles that would be easily stored until real decisions could be made, three pieces caught my eye. They looked like they belonged together. Just like the holiday cards from before, they looked like they were telling a story.

It took me a couple of days to talk to Michael about what I was thinking. Not out of fear but out of a “Is this something that I, Shawna, could project manage and make work?” and would he even want to bother with it.

When I finally showed him and told him what I was thinking, I could literally see a shift in his brain. He was excited. So it began. We started with social media and wiping out what was Quite Beautiful, Really and slowly applying what I had learned while working in hotels, talking to marketing savvy friends and researching on my own. We started working on the story together and every step of the way has been a collaboration, whether it is the illustrations, the story or how/where we post on the internet. We are putting our best (with a learning curve) out into the world with no expectations of getting anything from it. It is just something that we are doing together.