Keene State College Children's Literature Festival

I contributed this owl painting to the Keene State College Children's Literature Festival coming November 1, 2008 in Keene, NH. He's just little - only about 6" x 6" - acrylic. The "frame" is part of the art.

IRA in ATL

I was in Atlanta for the International Reading Association Annual Convention last week. It was fantastic! We lived in Atlanta for fourteen years but it was different to be a visitor and stay in the Marquis downtown with no worries about driving in horrible traffic. It is also a different city than when we moved away ten years ago - Atlanta gathers no moss. There is a terrific vital feeling to Atlanta but with a casual freshness. It made me miss living there - but then again I didn't have to drive anywhere. I had dinner downtown at a Mexican restaurant on quatro de Mayo with my friend and crit buddy Jenny Murray who was attending the conference, and dinner with my brother in law Robert Lee on the rooftop of Six Feet Under in westside Howell Mill area near my old studio in Murray Mill. Great food, great view, great company!

The convention was a fantastic experience but I never even took my camera out of my bag - so no visual aids. Highlights For Children commissioned David Harrison to do a delightful poem titled You Come, Too! and me to do the art for a poster that they gave away in their booth. David and I were sent to sign and sign we did - hundreds of them! I also had a chance to buy David's new book bugs; poems about creeping things and get that signed by the author as well. It is silly, whimsical, and lovely in its smallness with lots of white space and pitch perfect line drawings by Rob Shepperson. Although I planned on sneaking off the exhibit floor for some of the sessions upstairs I never did find a chance to get away. I really wanted to drop in on Sara Pennypacker and Marla Frazee's session. And Mark Teague's. And about ten other missed opportunities.

It was also very interesting to see an entire catalog from each of the publishers. I got a better sense of what they are all about by seeing the body of work. And I got a ton of freebies! I love freebies! I got Cartooning, The Ultimate Character Design Book by Chris Hart, signed and doodled in. And I picked up a bunch of free f&g's - my very most favorite and sure to be a huge sucess is Grace For President by Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. It is a fabulous girl-power story with a splash of civics and is illustrated by one of my all time favorites.


I also had a chance to see the advance copy of the next book in the math series I illustrated for Sylvan Dell Publishing, My Half Day by Doris Fisher and Dani Sneed. I am so delighted with this one! Hurray. I was able to sign in the Sylvan Dell booth as well.

What Next? 2

The national economy is not so good - really not so good on an extremely local level. Like I don't know how I'm going to gas up the car next week with the prices rising so fast. To that end I have been getting a bit more creative with my marketing efforts. Besides all the usual sending out this, snooping around that, knocking underneath things with a stick to see what dashes out, I am also putting together classes for a few local community arts centers in the fall. My main focus is going to be sequential art for teens - that means comics! Fun! Challenging! Intimidating! More on that later.

What next?

I seem to be at a bit of a crossroads. All my picture book obligations have been met. OM had been the pivot in my life for seven months and is now over. I have submitted my Halloween story and that means it is done (for the time being). Work is slow (more on that later...). With nothing to demand my time or attention I am now feeling obligated to get back into a shelved picture book project.

I finished a first draft back in September and it went through critiques in my Goalies with a bunch of helpful ideas. This project is different from the last though. In the past I wrote a draft, revised, expanded, and polished it before ever turning the least bit of attention to the art. With the manuscript done I looked at it for the first time as an artist and it was fresh again to me - it worked. But like children, every story is different and this one is demanding a different approach for me. I need to know who my characters are before I write their story so I've been scribbling here and there (on a long bus ride with my daughter's fifth grade school trip to DC, at the baseball field while my kids practice). I believe I am finally beginning to know these characters, sisters forced to walk home from school together, and they are coming alive for me.

My design approach is different for this as well, and I hoped for a fresher drawing style but I seem to draw the way I draw. But more ideas are coming as a noodle it out and I am hoping that this time I will let the characters dictate where it goes.

Tag, You're It

I've been tagged with an interesting meme by Elizabeth Dulemba. I am to pick up the book very most nearest to me, open it to page 123, jump to sentence #5 and post the next three sentences.

"The idea for Top Ten Uses for an Unwor[n] Prom Dress came to Ferarro after she spotted a book along the lines of 101 Things to Do with a Bridesmaid's Dress. "I wondered, 'Are there as many things to do with a prom dress? And what if it's an unworn prom dress."

This is from a First Books interview of Tina Ferraro about her book, Top Ten Uses for an Unworn Prom Dress by Alice Pope in the 2008 Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market. Interesting, huh? So why is this book the closest to me? Because I am sending out postcards to drum up some work and am gleaning it for contact persons and addresses. And because I am submitting a dummy package and am carefully sifting through the pages like it is some sort of Wish Book. Should I go for that cool new imprint or the reliable old house? So hard to choose!

I am tagging the bloggers in my fantastic Goalies group:
Christy Evers
Ian Sands
Janelle Bitikofer
Kathy Jacoby
Carol McGarrahan

Go forth and tag!

...Another Post

...and the recent work. I've been working on a story for about a year and finally have all the elements completed to begin submitting it to publishers. The subject matter is a midnight Halloween Trick or Treat tale (in the Victorian era, how's that for fun?), but there is no way I can push the watercolor to do what I want for this project. Hence the new medium. I did an acrylic cover painting and didn't love the finished result, especially the way it scans and the color dies, dies , dies. A more reflective and transparent medium is always going to give a more vivid scan. But I persevered, did another painting and this one has better color and a better design than the first - so there you go. I could do a few more before I call it quits but for now I need to move this one on out!

A sketch from an interior spread.

And many thanks for the encouragement given in my previous post Help Me. Sometimes that's all it takes; that and a couple gallons of dogged determination.

News and Views

So, a quick update on what's been going on in my little world.

My crit group, the Goalies, will be hosting another of our fabulous Schmoozes this coming Sunday at 3:00 at Quail Ridge Books and Music. We are hosting guest speaker Frances O'Roark Dowell, the award winning author of Dovey Coe, Chicken Boy, the Secret Language of Girls (a favorite of mine), the her latest Shooting the Moon. She will talk to us about Things She Didn't Know She Didn't Know about writing for the children's market. She is a wonderfully warm speaker and I want to invite each and every one of you to swing on by. This is free and open to the public, Frances will sign her books, plus free food!

My author/illustrated book ABC Safari has been included in the Bank Street College of Education's The Best Children's Books of the Year! I have another title coming out with Sylvan Dell Publishing very soon. This is the third in the series of wacky picture books focusing on math concepts by author Doris Fisher and Dani Sneed.

My Odyssey of the Mind season is over. Both my teams did fantastically well at the state tournament but fell short of a spot at World Finals.

I've been painting with acrylics lately but that's the subject of Another Post...

Help Me!

Red Hot Jazz

I don't even know what to think about this! I've been messing around with acrylic paint. What a struggle! I am having trouble with the color being bright enough, drying darker, drying different. This painting looks okay for real but the scan is ghastly. This is totally doctored up digitally.

Shall I:

a) keep going, keep growing- change is good

2) stick to what I know

x) get a job as an animal trainer

OM - now on to STATE!

My rockin' Road Rally team with the first place trophy

This may be boring for some of you but for me - it's all it! I've spent the last six months coaching not one, but two Odyssey of the Mind teams at the elementary and middle school level. Let me tell you, it's time-consuming to coach one team. With two teams I was meeting with seven kids - mostly at my poor house - four days a week. They were using power tools, painting scenery, using hot glue guns, and eating everything in sight. We went to our regional tournament this past Saturday and had a terrific time.

The good news - BOTH my teams are going on to the state tournament. The bad news - there's no bad news. Sibling rivalry is thwarted for another month. We'll see what happens at the state tournament but after that we may be on to the world competition.

My elementary school team totally rocked the tournament. They had to build and operate a vehicle that was solely propelled by them through a series of mechanical tasks (also engineered and built by them) while presenting a skit that worked to support the theme provided. Of all the teams - and there were 168 from elementary school level all the way up to college - my team had the third highest score of the entire tournament.

My middle school team came in second in their division but it is a more competitive atmosphere among the older teams. Their problem was to perform a story about one of the Greek Muses and incorporate several works of art including dance, sculpture, drawing/painting and music. I have an incredibly gifted bunch of kids on that team and they got the top score for that portion of the competition.

So, I'm still buried in OM for a while - hopefully a long while.