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!

Its interesting the response that I get when I tell people that I’m using oil pastels – most often they look at me like, you’re a glutton for punishment. I always have to respond that they’re not as hard as watercolors. I used to think that I was doomed to be a failed watercolorist for the remainder of my life, but I was quite pleased to discover yesterday that I’m actually enjoying the pastels more.

To be honest, I still struggle with the oil pastels, but I made a pretty exciting discovery – the colorless extender. There’s two of them in my box of Erengis that have been largely ignored, but I tried them out as a replacement for the white that I sometimes lay down first. Here’s the result, which gave me some nice translucent areas in the background and on her face:

The nice thing about it is it gives you some nice washy effects, and if you color your paper first you can scrape back to the white of the paper.

Another thing I’ve been playing with a bit is mixing the pastel with linseed oil, and because I was doing some washy areas I used some mod podge as a size. This was maybe less successful because of the blotchy areas, but maybe worth exploring further someday:

Anyone else out there having fun with oil pastels?

click to see it a tiny bit bigger.

I’ve been working from home for the last few days, which has meant toting all my art supplies from my studio to my house. Fortunately I’m pretty portable these days. I have less space working on the dinner table, and it doesn’t take long before I’m spread out everywhere, especially now that I have 3 different brands of oil pastels I like to use.

I just bought a box of Erengi Art Aspirers having read a few reviews comparing them to my much beloved neopastels.They were on sale and in spite of having to get them shipped from the States were still a pretty good deal. An example of overconsumption though – I did not need to buy more, but now I have a lovely new range of colours to play with!

I’m working on the color images now for the picturebook for Rubicon, and this is the tough part for me. I’ve read a bunch of books on colour and it still pretty much boils down to instinct. They’ll either feel right, or they won’t. Its funny that I’ve been having troubles with skin tones – why is it in nature we never look at someone and say, your complexion completely clashes with the landscape! Wouldn’t that be funny. But my kids were far too orangey in the beginning, and making them a little darker brown sure helped.

Here’s a version I played around with a bit on the computer. Not the final piece, though!

click to view larger

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.