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Essential Art

From my bud Ian Sands' story The Top Ten Essential Items For Surviving Fourth Grade. I'm not sure I'm done but it is suddenly less fun. Thinking I might add a bit more pattern to the foreground characters.

On to the next thing! My Play! Yes, I wrote a play. It will be performed Halloween. It's a Halloween play. I will share more later!

Day One - Top Ten Essential Items

Here's my first day of work on the final piece. Black colerase pencil on copier bond, photoshopping ensues.

(Lately I have been finding a mini-Barack Obama in just about every piece I do. What's up with that?)

Top Ten Essential Items...

I asked my friend, artist and writer Ian Sands if I could do some black and white pieces based on his story "The Top Ten Essential Items For Surviving Fourth Grade". It went something like this - me - "Ian I'm doing some stuff based on one of your stories." Ian - "Okay".

He is an incredible writer and this story is, well, incredible. I needed this - it's the most fun drawing I've had in a long, long time.

Sparky*org!

I have been working with the National Fire Protection Association lately. Sparky rocks! Tough yet tender, smart and silly. And they like me pretty well, too. They blogged about me here.

Crazy things I do when I have the time

I just completed several long months of heavy deadlines and had some time on my hands to do what I wanted. This isn't always very good for my family since I tend to be pretty determined and focused which means I am essentially gone. But my down-time and the beginning of our new OM season coincided.
I have been an Odyssey of the Mind coach for several years and am always so excited to start up with a new team of kids and a new challenge every year (links to previous posts here and here). Part of my job as coach is to get them to work together to build innovative ideas. Being me, I thought some sort of visual presentation would be best. Good gracious I couldn't have just stood up in front of them and told them!
I started with the idea that a PowerPoint presentation might be kind of cool. I drew out a few little doodles. Ten hours, three computers and five programs later I had a pretty rockin' little one-minute slide show presentation - with sound, okay. So it was overkill. The kids watched it, liked it, maybe got the message. I had a truly great odyssey of my own learning how to make PowerPoint squeak and laughed myself silly when I got some of the sound in.
But, being me, I couldn't leave it at that. I spent another several frustrating/engaging/exciting hours converting it to Windows Movie Maker and then uploading it to YouTube. The animation is really rough, okay. The soundtrack I ended up using is so canned and cliche. If I had planned on making an animated short from the start I wouldn't have ever used PowerPoint in the first place (what a clunky mess that is) but I never planned on making an animation from the start. I was just going to scold some kids to listen to each other - right?

...and the final

Not that I should be doing this because I have a devastating deadline, but I couldn't resist finishing this sample. I have a new rep and I am going to be sending her a postcard of this image for a dummy she's hoping to send around. I am also going to use it for my anonymous First Impressions at our SCBWI/Carolinas conference in a few weeks. So much for anonymity.

My new love is Photoshop. I know, I'm as surprised as anyone. This is my new "everything but the kitchen sink" technique that is totally super fast. And super fast means more work and more work means more money. So this is working for me. And it's fun. FW sepia acrylic ink line, blocked in watercolor, the pattern in the background was ink line, processed in Illustrator and completed in Photoshop, many, many digital enhancements in Photoshop to finish. Me = happy.

Family Fotos

the son

the daughter


the husband (on mandolin)


the dog


the cat