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.

We take possession of our new place today, but we haven’t even begun to pack – luckily we have the whole month. We have been spending most of April weeding out all the things we’ve accumulated over the last 6 years, and once again I despair over my giant footprint. I’m trying to gather up all the toys that my children don’t play with, and the awful thing is this: one tiny piece is missing from this toy/game, rendering it useless if I don’t find it, but surely it has to be in the house somewhere! And what if I get rid of this now and it turns up when I start moving out the furniture? I already had one instance when a boot of my daughters went to Big Brothers and the other one was mysteriously left behind. That nagged at me forever.

Seriously, there has to be a better way to deal with stuff. Obviously, acquiring less of it would be the best place to start (and that should be easier considering the jump in rent that we’ve undertaken) and I’m really thinking that I’m going to buy only second hand toys from now on. My daughter’s birthday is coming up and she’s dying for one of those new disney princess dolls, and so far they have not turned up on craigslist. If I buy something on ebay is it really better considering what it takes to ship it here?

Meanwhile I have been working on my third picture-book (number one is still out in the world, and number two was ready for sketches when I was sidetracked by number three). Its amazing how difficult they can be to write – isn’t there a better, simpler way that I can say this? Also compounding my difficulties was the fact that this time I created a story around what I felt like drawing. It may be to my benefit that if a line doesn’t feel right I will literally have a physical feeling about it, and I have to keep writing and rewriting it until I can read it without that nagging sense that those lines are just wrong. I think I may have got it, though, and I’m keen to continue with the sketches!

Here’s my kokeshi for the upcoming show at the Japanese American National Museum put on by the Los Angeles Toy, Doll & Amusement Museum. Like the last one I made, I found it pretty hard to part with her. Next time I’m making one for myself!

So we’re out of the playoffs, and to add insult to injury we lost to the team with the 55 points in 19 games gal (who scored 8 goals in 2 games against us), in spite of our best efforts to shut her down. I have to admit that almost team-wide we were off. I don’t know if it was nerves or missing our Kessler or just simply, an off night. The worst part is that I don’t take losing very well, and the madder I get the more intent I am in rubbing someone out in the boards, shoulder to shoulder. I always feel a bit ashamed afterwards, even though I always maintain that there has to be and always will be a physical element to the game, women or not. In fact they should allow it a tiny bit more and every woman should play one season just to recognize their own physical strength.

But the best part about it was that as bad as we all felt after losing (and we’d gone about 8 games without losing – I was beginning to think we were invincible – turns out we’re vincible), hanging around with my teammates and having a good laugh afterwards was the best thing imaginable, and made everything alright in the end. Seriously, I like my team so much I’m taking up golfing this summer just so I can see them.

click to see it a tiny bit bigger.

learn to fly

I’ve been working on some sketches for a stock illustration company, and because I like to be difficult and do things backwards, I got it into my mind that I wanted to sketch on the computer before coloring the picture traditionally. Its much easier in terms of composition if I can just move objects around rather than erase or trace, but as anyone with a tablet knows, nothing comes close to the feel of an actual pencil and paper.

I’ve been trying out some shareware versions of two programs by one company, FlySketch and Acorn. I came across FlySketch when I started using Journler a lot and wanted to be able to sketch into my entries. The above picture is done using FlySketch, which I have to say is pretty much the closest thing I’ve come to a good sketching program on the computer. Its not intended to be a high end drawing application and so there’s a lot of things that might otherwise be annoying, like the paper size will only go so large and you can’t rotate the page. But, mostly I want something that I can print out and then trace onto paper with my lightbox so I’m not too concerned about high res options.

Acorn Sketch

Acorn makes up for what FlySketch may be lacking, including some pretty cool filters (like the image above, using the bloom filter which for reasons not entirely clear to me, I like) and its pretty fun to sketch in, but for some reason I like FlySketch better, I’m not really sure why! But really, I should just get into carrying my pad of tracing paper everywhere with me, because I think in the end it would be a hell of a lot simpler.