Illustration Friday - Routine

OK this is the first Illustration Friday post with an illo from the lift the flap book I mentioned earlier. I have more on the story of this book in this post. This is from the page about sheep shearing and I figured it matched the theme because of the ranch hands have a routine when they clip a sheep. The first illustration is the main or background illustration, the next illo is the flap. This flap splits in two - imagine a midpoint down the leg of the ranch hand in the red shirt, the left side is the back of the flap, the right side is the front of the flap and is "closed" or what is seen when the reader turns to this page.

Christian the Lion

Tonight I was fiddling around on line reading some other blogs when I came across this on my friend Sherry's blog. Here's the story as I picked it up from her blog; this is quite a story and the video is a real tear jerker. I just thought it was cool so I decided to post it.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
In 1969, two friends, John Rendall and Ace Berg, purchased a lion. At the time, Christian the lion was a 35-pound cub. He had been born in a zoo. The friends raised Christian in their London home. All three hung out in a friend’s furniture shop on the weekends.

Within a year, Christian had grown to 185 lbs. Rendall and Berg realized they couldn’t keep him much longer. But they didn’t know what to do with him. A chance encounter changed that. Two actors from the film Born Free walked into the furniture store.

The actors recommended a conservationist, George Adamson, living in Kenya. Christian was soon in Africa. There he was rehabilitated and released into the wild.

In 1974, Rendall and Berg decided to visit Christian one last time. He was now a wild animal. Adamson told them it was doubtful that Christian could be found. No one had seen him in nine months.

The two flew to Kenya, anyway. On the day they landed, Christian appeared outside Adamson’s camp. Somehow, he knew. He waited outside the camp until Rendall and Berg arrived.

This video was taken during their reunion with Christian. What a story! What a video!

Winding Down Summer Projects and Flip Book Mania

Tonight I came out of the bedroom after putting Small Fry to sleep and I thought I really need to update my blog tonight... but sigh.... i have to be honest and say I just did not feel any real inspiration to write. But sometimes you have to shove the blahs aside and fake it so that one does not disappear into the ether in cyber space. One of the reasons I have not felt a whole lot of inspiration is because I am just slammed with work right now. It happens every summer so I'm not complaining (what with my habit of needing to eat) but I'm finally in the home stretch of the projects I'm working on. One of the projects I did this year was a lift-the-flap book. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post. I've never done a flip book before and I have to say this thing was excruciating. It was quite a challenge to get each side of the flap lined up with the underlying illustration. At one point Jim Dear pointed that he knew I was spinning my wheels with it because I was "looking in the mirror and sighing a lot" (I have a mirror over my drawing table that lets me see work at a distance without having to get back away from it). I told him that doing with was like having to paint the illustrations 3 times, but exactly the same each time!

Anyway I'll post a few pieces from it here. Unfortunately I don't have a cool way to show how the flap works so these are just the underlying illustrations that make up the main page.

These are the main characters in the book. Its a story about twins, Jack and Tracy, that live on a sheep ranch in Australia.


This was about how Tracy like to play with the baby lambs. It was quite interesting trying to match up my hay texture.


On top of the flaps this book presented two new challenges: drawing sheep being sheared and a weaving loom. I had to do quite a bit of research to see what goes into both processes. This is from the sheep shearing page, the ranch hands are cleaning up afterwards.


The last page, I was just kind of proud of this lighting effect.


Later this month I have to do give a talk to a women's group about "what I do" so I think I may take these illos and the sketches for them to show as this project was definitely different than the usual stuff I work on day in and day out.

Illustration Friday - Fierce

I know this illustration has already appeared on the blog but I think this is great for this week's Illustration Friday topic.


Plus let me be honest I'm so swamped with work right the moment I can't even consider doing something new, much as I'd like to. Every summer for the last 9 years or so I've worked on this really cool project - it's the Vacation Bible School books and materials for Lifeway. But the problem with it is that entails a WHOLE LOTTA work in a very short time and its completely confidential until they publish their catalog so I can't even complain specifically about it show any of what I'm working on! And what I'm working on right now is this neat little lift the flap book. I've never done a lift the flap book before so this has been quite the fierce challenge (heh heh getit? fierce... it could have been my post.) Anyway I"ll hopefully be able to post some of this work in late July or August.

Local Orphan Works update

This past Saturday I attended a local community forum on the Orphan Works legislation sponsored by Jim Cooper, the Congressman for Tennessee's 5th District and John Hall, a New York Congressman and singer/songwriter of The Orleans fame. Lucky for me living in Nashville means we get to be on the front row of intellectual property issues because of the music industry. Most of the people attending were songwriters or connected to the music industry but there was a scattering of visual artists in the group.

The group started by airing everyone's concerns regarding the legislation. Most everyone had the same complaints already heard about the bill; possibility of making everyone's work an orphan, flimsy language detailing what counts as a 'diligent search', financial hassle of having to re-register your work with an unknown amount of databases. For a full re-cap of problems go here. If there was anyone in the crowd supporting this bill they never spoke up. Then Cooper and Hall spoke on how they stand on the issue. Hall told an amusing anecdote about how the McCain campaign tried to use one of his most famous songs, You're Still the One, without compensation by claiming that the campaign couldn't find the author of the song. Since Congressman Hall appears as both a songwriter and performer in the song's credits and works just across the building from Senator McCain, Hall was a little surprised they couldn't find him. At any rate here was the big information we learned about what's happening with this on Capital Hill:

• Neither Cooper nor Hall support this bill. Cooper said he would "do anything he could to stop the bill."

• The bill is NOT being fast-tracked. This is a very good thing as this had been a concern that it would try to be passed by summer. Cooper said everyone is now tied up with appropriations.

• Cooper said the bigger fight on this would come next year when Congress reconvenes after the election.

• Right now no one in DC is talking about this, so clearly we need to step to the fight. There is the possibility of procedural maneuvers being used to bring the bill to a vote without debate but Cooper and Hall doubted that would happen especially since they could see that there was a groundswell of opposition to it even if its not being the hot topic on the Hill at the moment.

• Hall suggested the possibility of having a Judiciary Committee field hearing regarding the bill. He felt that in cities like Nashville where intellectual property is a significant part of our economy that the Committee could benefit from hearing the people's complaints first hand. I think this would be a good idea, and personally I'm all for getting this to happen.

• Neither Hall nor Cooper really knew what was happening in the Senate with the bill. Both said usually you can count on the Senate to not do much, however one of the bill's Senate sponsors is Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) and he tends to be a mover in the Senate. Anyone with ties to voters in Vermont needs to get on them about contacting Leahy to get off this bill.

Illustration Friday - Forgotten

My first Illustration Friday post. After reading about for a while about Illustration Friday, the creative mind expanding blog, I finally decided to try my hand at it. I hope I can keep up what with dividing my time between being a mom and cramming a 40 hour work week into 3 mother's day out days.

Anyway I sketched this about a year ago from the window of the Great Reading Room in the Nashville Library. You are pretty high up at that window and I noticed looking down on the roofs below that they would be a great place to come and get away from things. The girl wasn't there that day, but the shadows of pigeons as they swooped over the crumbling roof moldings gave me the sense that the space was waiting for something..... or someone.

Orphan Works

So its been a while since I posted and there's a very good reason for that, although its not the subject of this post..... but I might as well get it out there: It looks like the Fabulous Illustrator is working on a whole other kind of project - the kind that take 9 months to complete and makes you lose sleep afterwards. The deadline for this particular project is sometime around Christmas so that ought to be real interesting.

At any rate I have been meaning to post for a while about the Orphan Works Bill catastrophe that is striking visual artists currently. Simply put the Orphan Works Bill is a proposed legislation that would allow anyone searching for a copyright to a particular creative work and not finding it, to simply declare it an "orphaned work" and use it for whatever personal or commercial use desired. Should the owner of the copyright discover that his work has been thus pilfered, he would have to bear the burden of proof that the work was his and not the infringers. This is the opposite of the way copyright law reads currently. I strongly recommend listening to the interview with Illustrator's Partnership co-founder Brad Holland about this for a more in-depth view.

I had promised to post updates of the bill as it made its way through Congress. There have been several calls to write and call representatives and recently several visual artists as well as representatives from independent record labels convened on the Hill to express their displeasure with the folks that work for us (i.e. the politicians). Below is the report I just received on this:

Visual Artists Go to Washington, Independent Record Labels Oppose Orphan Works Act

Last week over two dozen visual artists, representing illustrators, photographers, fine artists and the arts licensing trades went to Capital Hill to explain to legislators how the Orphan Works Act will harm creators and the hundreds of thousands of art-related small businesses that serve and are dependent on them. At the same time, independent music labels have joined the opposition to orphan works legislation as it currently exists.

The Illustrators’ Partnership has stressed that Orphan Works legislation should be limited to true orphaned work and not act as an unwarranted compulsory license imposed on commercial markets. IPA, the Advertising Photographers of America and the Artists Rights Society have joined to offer amendments to that effect.

Excerpted from the Washington Internet Daily/Monday June 09, 2008:

The visual-arts community hit the Hill last week to protest what it portrays as a hijacking of the orphan-works issue as it was presented in a 2005 Copyright Office report...

The Copyright Office ran a bait-and-switch from its 2005 notice of intent, which focused on facilitating libraries', museums' and other nonprofits' efforts to digitize collections to improve access to them, [Illustrators’ Partnership co-founder Brad] Holland said. Artists want the issue narrowed back to that focus, scrapping commercial use, he said...Copyright Office roundtables on orphan works never addressed alternates to registries, an "untested, untried, unaccountable market system" favoring Google, Getty, Corbis and other commercial aggregators, Holland said. [Cynthia] Turner [also of the Partnership] said artists would incur high costs registering works, and they hesitate to hand over high-res, commercial versions to Google or others.

In the same article, Washington Internet Daily also reports that the leading group of independent music labels has broken with the corporate music trade associations. The American Association of Independent Music has published a position paper opposing the current orphan works bills. The article quotes a music industry executive: "I can tell you that nobody in the music business" sought the bill.

... the executive said the bill is "de facto... establishing a new compulsory license" by putting unregistered artists at a legal disadvantage in court. The law can't explicitly require registration or it will violate the Berne Convention, TRIPS and other treaties the U.S. has signed, the executive said. Book publishers and music executives in the U.K. think the U.S. will be in trouble, the executive said, citing a recent visit: "I can tell you there are European commissioners that are looking at this right now."
-Excerpts from “Orphan-Works Bills Scorned by Visual Arts, Indie Labels” by Greg Piper, Washington Internet Daily June 09, 2008