Sketch Time

Since I became a mom I have noticed that I can sketch a child's figure much faster and better than I used to be able to. By this I mean I can usually get the pose I want down in the first few tries as opposed to sketching, erasing, sketching again. Being able to do it quickly results in a sketch that is much more "alive." Not only can I get a body pose the way I want it, I can usually do hands, feet and expressions just as quickly - these used to be some of the harder parts for me. I don't know, is this just from a few more years of practice or because I'm constantly seeing little hands and feet and mouths and eyes all around me all the time? I don't know.... I like to think maybe a little of both. Here's a couple of unused sketches from a project that I just started, these feature some good hand movements I think:




In other news I'm just about finished with my promo illustration for my 10th year of freelancing. I'll be posting it shortly, but here's a teaser sketch:

Adventures with Small Fry

The Friday before Easter, Small Fry and I trucked down to mommy's hair dresser to tame his locks. The following are just a sampling of the near total photographic coverage of the event:

The Before picture:


Miss Patty cuts away, check out his mousse mohawk


The After picture. What a handsome little boy! This is right before Miss Patty handed him a blue lollipop.... mommy knew that white shirt was a bad idea.


Since this is supposed to be a blog about the adventures of an artist it is only fitting that I share some images of Small fry being an artist, of course he just the most brilliantly creative genius to sit in a high chair. Think I'm wrong? Watch the video and see how patiently he handles the art director's mundane requests to "put it on the paper."

Face Space

A couple of months ago 60 Minutes did a show about how wonderful creation known as Facebook.com. We saw this embryonic billionaire CEO describing how great his creation is and how much (as yet ungenerated) money he will generate with it. Jim Dear and I sat and laughed at the TV, saying"its just a souped up version of e-mail!" and "who has time to do that stuff."

who indeed.

Sure enough, as if on cue, 24 hours after that show aired I started getting e-mail invitations: "So and So has added you as a friend on facebook, click here to confirm that you are in fact friends with So and So." Well this so and so was a friend from church... i couldn't very well NOT respond.... wouldn't that be tantamount to saying you're not my friend? So I clicked ok, created an account, and, with much reluctance, joined the throngs flocking to facebook.com.

My Wednesday lifesaver, Becky, (a.k.a. Small Fry's babysitter) has been telling me for some time that I need to join MySpace. Becky is this cute, 23 year old newlywed with plenty more time on her hands than the Fabulous Illustrator. She persisted in convincing me: It was so hip she said, you can show off pics of Small Fry she said, everyone's doing it she said. I said isn't that the very same website full of 12 year olds pretending to be legal? She rolled her eyes and said "some of them actually are legal, besides you can set your profile to private." My response (as it is for sooo many things) was i don't have time for that stuff. And i persisted in not having time until the Facebook invites started rolling in, because sure enough, right behind them, came the Myspace invites. Now my best friend from highschool, Jules, was telling me "you have to get on there and see who's gotten OLD!" So finally I did it, i joined myspace too.

It was all down hill from there....

A couple of hours, and a few clicks later, there were my profiles, gleefully touting all my accomplishments: marriage, parenthood, 10 years of being gainfully self-employed as an artist. I left jaunty comments on my friends walls like "Hey! whats up!" and "yeah its cold here too!" A couple of days after joining, while Small Fry was at mother's day out, I managed to waste an entire morning looking up people I barely even knew the first time I met them. And it wasn't long before I also convinced Jim Dear to join both Myspace and Facebook. My argument was that all MY friend's husband's had profiles, what if i got hit on by some 14 year old! As for my profiles, so far they are pretty low brow. I haven't added any pictures yet and I don't have a pimped out background. By Becky's standards it falls into the loser category. That's ok, one of these days I'll get around to adding more stuff to it, for now its just kind of nice to be able to smugly type in my password when Myspace says "only members may view this page, please confirm that you are, in fact, friends with us."

Epilogue:
Just for posterity, and for one time only, I'm going to list all the aforementioned Facebook and Myspace profiles here. Read 'em and say what a fabulous illustrator I am:
My Facebook
My MySpace

Jim Dear's Facebook
Jim Dear's MySpace

Becky's MySpace
Jule's MySpace

The Fabulous Illustrator has a new computer!!! Yayy!

So a couple of months ago I walked into my local Apple store, consulted with Rustin the Fabulous Mac Dude, and plonked down a small wad of cash for a brand spankin' new iMac. This last month I have been breaking it in on a huge project I do twice a year and, happily, it's really settling into its new home quite nicely. I don't buy new computers that often, in fact I have only ever owned four since I became Mac literate, circa 1994. My first was a Power PC7100. It was the computer I started my business with and it was such a weakling compared to what I have now, but oh, I still have a soft spot for that computer. I bought it in 1995 with my leftover college savings and when I finally upgraded to a new computer 5 years later I kept it in our attic for a while because i just couldn't bear to throw it away. The second computer I bought was a G4 tower which is still sitting right here, eyeing the new iMac grimly. It knows the computer hierarchy is about to change and it will have to give up the premier spot on the desk. A couple of years ago, after the Small Fry was born, I bought a laptop, a MacBook Pro. At the time it became the lightening fast computer, faster than the G4 and I had every intention of it being the new new studio computer but discovered that it was much more convenient with a baby to have TWO computers - one in the studio, and one in the house on which I could simultaneously do page layouts and color corrections, cook dinner, feed a baby, and check e-mail. So the G4 maintained its reign, but time (and software and internet apps) marches on and late last year I realized the G4 really was showing its age. It's 7 years old now and it had brought me into the second phase of my business: moving from surviving to thriving and moving into my swanky custom designed studio in the garage. Anyway after much hemming and hawing, budget crunching, and drooling as I strolled with Small Fry past the store in Green Hills Mall I called my husband at work and announced that we had a new computer.

Now I just have to say that I have always thought of my computers as having personalities. Maybe its because when you work by yourself and you work on this one particular thing so much, it begins to seem like a person, a co-worker. It has days it doesn't want to work as well as the days you could just kiss it for coming through for you. Maybe because it was my first, my Power PC was always a scrappy determined little machine, always hardworking, always dependable. It was like the nerdy guy in accounting that saves the company billions and then gives all the credit to his goofy boss. The G4 is much more dignified. When I first pulled it out of the box I remember thinking "now this looks more like a computer for grown-ups." Its like the old time CEO who works hard, plays hard and expects respect from everyone. The new iMac is pure bad ass. With its sleek styling and dizzyingly fast processing speed it looks like the young hotshot brought in to take over the company. It doesn't really care if people respect it as long as they get out of its way. I was hooked watching it toss 100MB files around like summer homes in a hurricane. But I better not tell it that it was not the fastest computer in the store that day.... just the fastest one I could afford! It may just have a Mac Pro complex somewhere behind that immense 24 inch screen. Thats ok, if it keeps working like it has the last couple of months, it can keep its new spot on the desk.... for the next few years anyway.

Feeding the homeless

Tonight our church is doing Room in the Inn. In nashville there is a program amongst area churches that feeds and houses homeless people for the night. Each church takes a different night and the Campus for Human Development, which started the program, brings the people to the church and picks them up in the morning. Church groups make dinner and breakfast for the people and then eat the evening meal with them. Its an ingenious plan really, the homeless folks get a better night than the one they would have on the streets and the church folk get a chance to see that homeless people are still people. Anyway I had signed up to bring some veggie dishes and then I get a frantic e-mail from my friend Holly, who was coordinating tonight's dinner, that they need more potato dishes - she's the only person who signed up to bring one. So i check the fridge and happen to have a half full bag of potatoes. I e-mail Holly that I can mash them but they will only feed about 6 or 8 people. She says bring 'em on, we need as much food as we can get. So I scrub and boil potatoes while Small Fry is napping. When i get them all mashed up in the dish, milk and butter added, these potatoes look pretty scrawny. I mean I'm not even sure they will feed 4 people let alone 6 or 8. if Jim Dear and I were eating them they'd be gone in one night (we eat too much but thats behind the point). Quickly i cast about the kitchen looking for something to stir in to make the potatoes seem less sparse, but there's nothing you can add to mashed potatoes except more potatoes! Frustrated I change them into a smaller dish so they don't seem SO small and go about cooking the other food I am supposed to bring. Everything gets in the oven and I'm cleaning up when lo and behold in the dish drainer I see one lone potato. Apparently in my scrubbing, peeling, boiling, frenzy i missed this one. At first I was annoyed-I'd already cleaned up everything-what am I supposed to do with ONE potato? Then I thought to heck with it, i'm going to boil and mash this one potato and add it to the scrawny potatoes at least there will be a little bit more. So thats exactly what i did. Even with just one potato it took a while to boil it down soft enough to mash but I worked on the computer and checked it every so often. Finally it was done and I mashed it up till it was good and creamy and added it into the scrawny potatoes. All of a sudden they didn't look that scrawny.... in fact they look like they could feed 6 or 8 people now, or maybe even 9. I can't believe one potato can do that much but it can. I'm sure there's an allegory there somewhere .....

mashing one potato

I'm back from the SCBWI Winter Conference part III-Fun and Inspiration

Well this is going to be about some of the funnier things that happened at the conference, i thought they were funny anyway. On Sunday, toward the end of the conference, Lin Oliver mentioned that it was Jane Yolen's birthday the next day. Lin had a huge big bouquet of flowers and she suggested that we should sing Happy Birthday to Jane Yolen. Then she said "now I don't have a great singing voice but I know Arthur Levine does, so he can lead us in singing happy birthday!" Arthur was standing at the podium at the time and as Jane Yolen approached I (because I was sitting in the front row) heard her say to him "is this going to be like a Marilyn Monroe thing?" I think she was joking but Arthur says "I can do that!" Then he proceeds to sing Happy Birthday in this very breezy sultry voice (that was pretty good) just like the Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK. It was hilarious but when he was done Lin Oliver said "you know we're gonna but that on YouTube." Now I have looked and looked on YouTube to see if someone did actually post it but I haven't found it yet. If someone reading this finds it let me know, I'd love to put a link here.

Another funny was Carolyn Mackler's address at lunch on Saturday. She was really incredible, a great speaker and story teller. During her speech she mentioned how, when you write fiction, everyone assumes its autobiographical. When her book The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, a story about a highschool girl dealing with anxiety about her weight among other things, was published her friends came to Mackler and told her that after reading her book they had no idea she had lost that much weight. She responded "Thats ok, I write FICTION." She also explained her theory of how it is unnecessary to assume a lone, sullen person on an airplane is a terrorist if they have just started reading a book: if its a good book it's unlikely that they will blow up the plane before they have finished it.

The last speaker on Sunday was Richard Peck. I grew up reading his books and hearing my mom, who was a librarian, tell stories of hearing him speak at ALA conventions. I'd never seen him before and I really wish I had a video of his talk, it was so inspiring. He had almost a sermonly presence behind the podium. His point was about how creating books for children is one of the most singularly impressive and important things we can do, and how reading is one of the most important things a young person can do. I wrote down his quote "If you don't find yourself on the page early in life you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places." How true.

I'm back from the SCBWI Winter conference part II - Some good stuff some not good stuff

Well I'm getting back to this a little later than i wanted to but here's a continuation on NY:

One of the two disappointing things was the lack of one-on-one meetings that are often available at the regional conferences. I know the chapter that I am in, midsouth region, and the Southern Breeze region (AL, GA, MS) allow you to sign up for portfolio critiques which is just invaluable (see my earlier post). Such was not the case in NY which I knew going in but I thought there might be a little bit more of a chance to talk personally with the speakers. However after every session each panel was swamped with people wanting to do the same thing. It was a situation where there were just so many people i deemed it not worth it to stand and wait, its not like they would remember ME with 1000 other people trying to get their attention. The other disappointment, and i really think SCBWI could remedy this, was the lack of information on who viewed the Friday night portfolio show. I thought that we would be given a list of who attended so that we could follow up with mailings etc. However when i asked that night as I picked up my book i was told no, if the attendees wanted to get in touch with us then they would have taken a mailer. Well true, but I DID pay close to a grand to attend this conference and I AM a card carrying member of SCBWI so I kind of THINK that they could help us out a little bit more than that. I mean it would have been pretty simple to do: attendees would have had to show an invite to get in, they could have collected all the invites and then made a list from that. Even if it was just a name and publishing house, those of us industrious enough could have tracked down the rest. For all we know there were 2 art directors and the rest of the attendees were other hotels guests looking for food. I don't really think this was the case but I'm jus' sayin'.

BTW if you want a really complete play by play version of the conference check out Kristi Valiant's blog. And just for the heck of it here are my break-out session notes from a conference round-up e-mai. Each of these sessions were about what each editor wants to publish:
David Gale
VP and Editorial Director Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers
This is their flagship hardcover imprint and it is retail driven.
They are reducing their list: 2008 is 76 titles, 09 and 10 will be even less, his personal list is 18 titles about a third of that are pictures books. In PB he looks for kid friendly, quirky. Does NOT want something intended for adults, does NOT want idealized kids. Looks for few lines and is not crazy about rhyme. In older books, he thinks teen horror will be the new fantasy. He read from a couple of manuscripts that he had bought that were horror. I have to say this guy was not that all that encouraging. He pretty much said it was better to send samples to the Junior staff instead of him "because the junior staff can make a name and get raises by finding new authors." As far as art submissions go, he seemed to think it was better to send to the art directors, i did not get the impression that he would really look at art samples alone.

Caitlyn Dlouhy (da-LOO-ee)
Editor Simon and Schuster imprint Atheneum. She has been there 15 years. She said was she is looking for can be summed up in one word - Voice. And she thinks illustrators have a voice too in their work. She considers style a voice, a consistent intriguing style is a consistent intriguing voice. She said she does look at everything, even art samples. She said she almost prefers things to come without an agent because "then no one has judged it before me." She said she will look at things that come with SCBWI NY conference marked on envelope. She edits 16-22 books a year and it is even split between PB, YA, and middle grade. She does look for artists for chapter book art and cover art. I have to say this lady was really refreshing after my first breakout session, she seemed very interested and open to new voices.