Awhile ago I’d had a very promising phone call from the senior editor at the publishing company I would most like to work with, she called just when I was starting to think that they were going to pass on my book and that I should send it out elsewhere. She was very encouraging, but after two months finally came back to tell me that they were going to pass. You can imagine that this was pretty disappointing, but I’ve taken a lot of hope from our phone call and from the fact that this was the first time and the only company that I’ve ever sent anything to, and so at least getting a phone call was a very good sign.

What I’ve been thinking about lately (in terms of failures and successes) is how we feel about, or interpret them. In the two months between the phone call and the eventual rejection I was overcome by a kind of paralysis – when it came to making art all I could think of was picture books and little else. So for two months I was kind of unproductive – well, ok, I did finish writing another picture book and complete almost all the sketches, but that was a kind of back-up in the event of rejection. I did not make one piece of art purely for the enjoyment of it, or one piece of art without any kind of underlying ambition, which is very unusual for me considering how much I like drawing. And maybe because of my move and loving being at home I haven’t been to my studio much either, so I couldn’t shake the feeling that for two whole months I was just pissing my days away. But here’s where I started thinking about the way I feel about things – deep down it bothered me that I was paralyzed but- what’s wrong with a certain slowness to your days, enjoying your new home with its gorgeous mountain views, allowing your contentment to just be? Why does there have to be a striving for something, ambition, or an I should be doing this or I should be doing that?

Its like hockey, too. We played the majority of our spring season with 8 skaters. We kept losing to the point that I was beginning to wonder if I had an inflated sense of how good we were, because I felt like we should have been beating everyone. Last night we had our first playoff game and we played with 8 but I was wonderfully free of emotion. I was hating playing hockey the game before, but last night I had no real feelings about anything, and almost felt like a defensive machine. Seriously, I played so much better for it – sure, there was enough of that wanting-to-win emotion that’s so necessary, but I can play so much better without all the striving. And the getting mad. And we won!

Anyway, the reason they passed was mostly because my book reminded them of another book Fletcher and the Falling Leaves – not so surprising to me because I already talked about its influence, and have I mentioned how much I love Tiphanie Beeke? It was because of her I started using oil pastel. But in the two years since this book started, the illustrations have changed – and I’m going to redraw the whole thing, and remove what really is the most obvious point of comparison between the two books:

From this:

to this:

to this:

Recently one of my workmates was unloading some things her children had outgrown, and I picked up the book The Biggest Best Snowman by illustrator Will Hillenbrand. I was pretty intrigued by his style and the textures he was getting, and (like most picture books) there was a bit of info regarding the media he was using – the one I was most curious about was his paper, which was vellum.

Always eager to hand over more dollars to my local art store, I went to buy some but was rather discouraged to find that the heaviest they carried was something like 29lb and that that was as heavy as it got. How did he use watercolour and acrylic on it? My own experiments were horrible, wrinkled messes.

Luckily for me, googling the illustrator turned up his website and a whole section on his process! Isn’t the internet fabulous for sorting out your problems for you? It turns out the trick is he’s dry mounting the vellum. Not having a dry mount press, I’ve resorted to vellum spray glue, but after playing around with the mixed media bit I’m back to oil pastels. The spray glue stinks and is probably not the most environmental solution – I’m either just going to tape the vellum to bristol to keep it flat, try dry mounting with an iron (apparently some mixed results with this) or try out some Letratac adhesive sheets.

In the meantime, here’s a picture I made for my new book, done with oil pastel on vellum:

page one from my new picturebook, wip

I have to say I love it – I finally feel like after 2 years of experimenting I’ve found my materials – no small thing, I assure you! It works beautifully with oil pastel, its so easy manipulate the pastel with a paper stump.

I haven’t written in a month, and the first thing I did was wade through my comment spam and came across this:

I was just reading a point on how to place your down comforter all puffy again and on the brink of all the answers said that you can save some tennis balls in the dryer to amount to that happen. how to build tabular tennis tables So how does that chef-d’oeuvre exactly? Why does this happen? Can you throw away something else rather than tennis balls? Gratefulness you!

Why does this happen indeed!

So I will try and encapsulate what I’ve been up to for the past month:

a) my daughter was frightened by my hairy armpits recently (they’re not grotesquely hairy!) and tried to put my arms down so that she would no longer have to look at them (I was lying on the couch at the time). When I told her that she would have hairy armpits too when she got older she wailed, no, I want to look like Barbie!! This is a sign that I am failing horribly as a parent.

b) I love my new house. Although we have been here for two weeks today is the first day of officially being moved out of the old. I’m writing this from my kitchen window where I am overlooking the courtyard and the crowd of children playing outside, including my own. I cannot stress enough the joy I feel at booting my children into the great outdoors after dinner.

c) Here is a little picture of my new deck. I have been foregoing my studio of late just for the sheer pleasure of sitting outside with its gorgeous view of the mountains. What is missing in the photo is the smudge left on the glass door by my forehead when I ran into it. As I later remarked to a friend, I’m not used to things being so clean.

d) some gigs again finally, and practicing once a week is starting to pay off. I was horrified lately when I came to the realization that I have been playing guitar for 16 years. 16 years!! Ok, not religiously or anything, and there was quite a long bout of only being the rhythm guitarist, and yes, sometimes my fingers still behave like they’re clinging to a bass guitar, but shouldn’t I be better by now? The tradeoff though, is that I am not so professional that I find it a chore to practice every week. In fact, I love it.

e) Mood lately: I’m a happy happy camper. Grateful Me!