One Book Done!

Pant pant... deadlines and art. Satisfying when it's all ready to go out there!

I think I was rendering a pant leg in my dream last night! Cross hatching in graphite was definitely in there somewhere. Meeting many deadlines had me up till the wee hours, and I mean very wee. Now up with the sun to the next project so I can maybe MAYBE make it to the Society of Illustrators galla tonight- the annual Original Art show. The Grammy's for picture-bookers. Going to check out yum originals, hopefully. I would love to see some brilliant work. Check out Fuse #8 for a cool invite to not only another KidLit Drink Night, but a post Society Show one, with a proposed raffle for a piece of art for Robert's Snow! Woo!

Wish me luck, if I get all my work done: sketch revisions, redrawing final art for a movie! (news later) and sweeping the ashes from the fire, I may get to the Society in time for the stroke of midnight. Now if the UPS pumpkin would just show up! I need to mail my finished book!

I'm calling it a SNOWSTORM!

Good afternoon! Brrrrrr... it's chilly here in the Northeast. PERFECT for snowflakes! The blogging effort in preparation for the November-December auction for Robert's Snow has officially begun. All the snowflakes in the auction are original works donated by book illustrators with all proceeds going to cancer research at Jimmy Fund.

Even cooler (har..har..): to get the word out, the wonderful blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast is sending out its army of bloggers and blog readers to interview snowflake illustrators each day and post them on their own blogs. It's "Blogging For a Cure" and in their words, they are "doing what they can in this multi-blog, cross-posting effort to drive traffic to the online Robert’s Snow auctions and help raise money for cancer research. And it’s all in the memory of Robert Mercer, Grace Lin’s husband, who recently passed away due to a rare form of cancer."

Wow...that paragraph was way bloggy. I apologize for overusing the "b" word.

Today is day 3 of the interviews. Go read! I'm up Oct.25th with Jackie Parker at http://interactivereader.blogspot.com/ It's a Robert's SNOWSTORM!

Genova Heights

Tonight I stayed up late in my room/studio, holed up on a Friday night, with my favorite new music filling the room. I have been so busy with projects and assignments, and been out and about. So, when I felt a tiny twinge of the "creating craving" creep back in, I put it all aside to feed it and pay some attention.

It is never a waste of time to listen to this urge, and I draw any way I'd like, let the lines break apart and live in and outside washes and just play. I always learn a bunch to bring back me back to focus, so I can center my awaiting jobs on these lessons. This process is hard to explain in words, but it is SO vital to what got me the jobs, the agency, any work in the first place. It's the quiet place I need to return to, to bring back something shiny and new.

Here is something I brought back, still working. I named her "Genova Heights" after the song by Stars that was on repeat. I am learning how to use digital paint as my opaque-ing tool, most of all and to let it not cover the nature of digital art- the pixelation and the squiggly line is something to be accepted in the relationship with the watercolor underlays and pencil drawings. Media is media. Learning....

Autumn

Here's a little hello from the desk, before I plunge into the next 2 projects for the day. Hope everyone is well. I feel so lucky to be a New Englander during this season. The leaves are just starting to turn, and everything feels new and fresh and vibrant.

I did get a tiny break this weekend to venture out to Concord MA! The center of Concord is beautiful, very old fashioned and welcoming. Of course, I also love it because Orchard House (home of Louisa May Alcott/ setting for Little Women) sits there in its original spot on Lexington Road. We walked passed my favorite transcendentalist's home, Ralph Waldo Emerson (above). Oh Ralphie!

So magical to imagine, as the long shadows of afternoon hit the house, that so many wonderful ideas and creations were thought up and written and whispered between friends and like minds in that neighborhood. Thoreau, Emerson and the Alcott family all gathered around for one of Louisa's "plays" on a cold night (these visits did occur according to the Alcott home curator).

Makes me want to write stories!
New art soon, promise.

School Days

Crisp fall air...back to school feelings, layered from years past.
Here is a fast sketch for an interior drawing for a book I am working on with Little Brown,
100Days and 99Nights. Big sister and little brother are walking home from school...after a bit of trouble with the principal. Hope all is well on this beauuuutiful day.

iLove Picture Books! Hello MAC. Goodbye PC.

So remember all the overlapping projects and the crazy project schedule? Well, during the pinnacle (but conveniently at least a week before most due dates) my little HP PC decided to crash!

I managed to salvage all my files, sadly say goodbye (until I fix it someday) to my little laptop, and moved on to bigger and yes better things. I am now working on a new and monster-big iMAC. (well compared to my little laptop, it feels luxuriousy like I am swimming in space in Photoshop). So it was a little wake up call I suppose.

Here is a test with the built-in PhotoBooth application. Patrica Polacco makes some tasty tasty books.

Update from a crazed illustrator.

Hey there! I am being very neglectful of this blog because of deadlines and overlapping projects!
I'm sorry most of it can't be posted, since it is in the middle/sketch stages or it is under an NDA. Phew! Working away all day, and taking breaks when night time falls. Possibly Waterfire in Providence this weekend, if I get enough done! I had a brief two day mini vaca with the family in Cape Ann on Bearskin Neck (above photo courtesy of my lovely sister Shauna). So so beautiful, reminded me a lot of the spreads in good ol' Miss Rumphius by Barb Cooney.

Hope all is well out there in the blogosphere. Send positivity and good thoughts or prayers to Grace Lin and friends of the Blue Rose Girls-a very sad event has occurred. I feel Robert's Snow means something very different now to the participants, and all involved in the fight to find a cure.

Love to all.

Auguste

Here is a small piece I am working on right now. I found her in the dusty files of personal art 2007, named "Auguste". I am patching her up to send on to my agency to add to my online portfolio. I am currently in the middle of totally reorganizing and cutting my portfolio down (aka removing very old pieces, etc. in styles I have outgrown). I have dubbed it spring cleaning with my agent, but it's more like cleaning out the closet and making a big pile of the clothes that just do not fit any longer and passing them on to younger sisters or friends. Shauna, want a cardigan? Oh wait, all my little sisters have outgrown ME! So much for "oldests" being "tallests".

I am also doing this big revamp in preparation for my current workload, and the hefty amount of finishes that will be produced in the next 3-5 weeks. Working on four new book covers, a picture book and a paperback short story, and the next Sleepover Squads! woohooo art.
Glad it's a rainy day here in S-ville.

A Saami Snowflake

So the finished snowflake! I finally mailed it in to Dana Farber before I took off for Mom's 50th in CT this week (woohoo!). I thought I would join the ranks of flake posters (check out the Blue Rose Girl blog for Anna Alter's and Alissa Imre Geis'). Feels great to be finished, and I'm excited to see where this little traveler and her red bird guide will end up. I'd like to say a big thanks to all my bulletin-responding friends for their input! :) These are the front and back done on Arches watercolor hot press paper and adhered to the wooden whitewashed snowflake. Mixed media: watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, graphite.

The red bird is a bit of a symbol in my family now, since my grandmother passed away in 2004 from Leukemia, since she had her own special story as to why she loved red birds so much. Her name was "Pocca", she was one of those grandmothers who allowed her grandchildren to name her and then strongly defended this namesake despite it originally being "Mocha Pocca". Haha... she was wonderful. So there is the red bird, a bit of hope at the top of the girl's massive hood, looking ahead as a tiny guide, and woven into the tribal fabric on the back.

For her costume design: I have recently in the past few years, fallen in love with the Saami people of northern Finland and the surrounding icy regions, which connect over into the north of Asia as well. They are reindeer herders, and even today, fight for maintaining this way of life amidst modernization. Their traditional clothing is so celebratory and beautiful, even in such a bleak (to us!) landscape. They are a beautiful people.

So there, all done. This one and all Robert's Snowflakes will be on auction on the Dana Farber site, and will be able to be viewed by late August, so keep checking to see the 2007 collection! All proceeds of all snowflakes will go to cancer research. If you want to see them in person, there will be 2 special gallery showings: Child at Heart Gallery, Newburyport, MA: October 3 - 22; Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA: October 30 - December 2

New art is up!

Hey all! Hope the Fourth treated you all well (we had rain! oh well).
I am excitedly heading into some crunch time ahead, equipped with new things learned from the past weeks of experimentation and emersing myself in good art anywhere I could find it. This piece is watercolor underpainting and digital collage/paint, done for a client a few weeks back.
It will be in an inspirational magazine.

This week, my new work on Shannon Associates should be more organized, but until then, take a look at pages 6-11 on my web portfolio.