chosen the work of a young, and very much alive, Bermudian artist.

Ms Dana Cooper, art director of RG Magazine wrote and illustrated My Bermuda ABC, an attractive book for young readers, two years ago. In it, each letter of the alphabet represents a person, place or thing related to Bermuda.

Now, in an unusual behind-the-scenes look, the general public can see for themselves the actual process involved in creating her book. The title of the show is self-explanatory: From Idea to Reality: How Her Book Was Made.

On show are the original watercolour illustrations, alongside the finished, printed pages, and the zinc plates on which each picture is laboriously etched with a needle.

"Since they were hand coloured, I had to make several prints of each etching to test progress and the different colour washes.'' She explains that each print is different: "One may come out brilliantly and the next one could be hopeless!'' For Ms Cooper, the entire process of creating and publishing the book proved to be something of a voyage of discovery and it is this aspect that she felt she would like to share.

She thought that the exhibition might be of special interest to children, who could come into Masterworks, free of charge, just to look and learn: "I wanted to do something for kids that doesn't have a price-tag! I thought it would be interesting for people to see the creative process and to try and show that art can be fun. In Bermuda, it so often seems that art has to be priced in order to be validated.'' She also felt that the display, as laid out in the show, would encourage others who wanted to publish their own books.

"This book came about almost by accident,'' she admits. "I took several courses in childrens' books illustration.'' This was at Parsons School of Design in New York where she earned her degree in Fine Arts. Her interest piqued, she decided to learn different media and continued her studies at the National Academy of Design, where she specialised in etching. There, it was suggested that she study the work of famous 19th century French illustrator, Grandville.

"Some of his Victorian illustrations are very small, and after looking at his work I began to experiment by drawing illustrations around individual letters.'' From that beginning, came the idea of an illustrated ABC and then, the concept of a Bermudian theme.

Ms Cooper soon found that self-publishing was a relatively easy procedure, since there are various "how-to'' books on the market that take the novice through each stage.

She admits that an aspiring self-publisher has to have capital, but points out that, in her case, she had re-couped the outlay within a couple of weeks of distributing the book to stores around the Island.

"I made up dummy pages and took them to the stores to see if they would be interested. So I was able to pre-sell -- and that can be very helpful.'' Her dummy books are works of art in themselves, some of them miniatures of around two inches.

"If you're working with a writer, it's easier to plan the layout if you have your idea for the finished product in front of you in its entirety,'' she explains.

Ms Cooper warns that the creation of a book from inception to the finished product is a time-consuming process: "I wrote the text myself, so I spent about two months in libraries doing background research, it took about six months to make all the etchings and another two months for the actual printing.'' Two states of the book were done, the first in sepia tones, which was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York and won her the prestigious Edward Mooney Award.

Dana Cooper's hand-made greeting cards, many of them with Bermudian themes, are also distributed throughout North America, including the gift shops of the American Museum of Folk Art and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Before joining the staff of RG Magazine , Ms Cooper was an assistant art director for Sports Illustrated and she has also worked for The Washington Post.

BRINGING HAPPINESS TO CHILDREN -- Ms Dana Cooper shows how she created and published her children's book, My Bermuda ABC in an exhibition at Masterworks.