Baby Sings Again and Again

I went to the Rocky Mountain Chapter SCBWI Conference about a week ago. It was great!

Salina Yoon did quite a few fantastic presentations. She is full of energy, enthusiasm, and book ideas- she's published about 150 books for children! She critiqued my dummy and portfolio in general. She was very positive about my artwork which was great to hear. She also had plenty of comments about my dummy that I'm working through.

Tricia Lawrence was one of the agents at the conference, and she gave me great feedback about my dummy as well.

And Stan Yan did a session about drawing repeatable characters, something that I needed. We all drew the same character on graph paper from different angles. We also drew a series of just faces with different expressions, and a series of figures with different body language.

All of this has led me to redoing the story and artwork with lots of new energy and ideas. Baby now has a name, Rosie. (This week it's Rosie anyway!) So the new version of my book is Rosie Sings. I'm afraid you will have to see more images from the book as I keep working on it. I hope you like them!

Susurrus and Illuminate

I'm so excited about these book pages! These are the first two spreads from the collaboration I'm doing with Clara Boza. I just got the top spread in the mail from her today. It illustrates the word Susurrus: a whispering, murmuring, or rustling. I bet you can tell which side I did! Clara's side is made from handmade Japanese paper and gouache. If you run your hand over it, it sounds like the rustle of leaves. And it's sooooo neat!

The bottom spread is for the word Illuminate. I used watercolor pencils and stamps on the right. I really wanted to continue the artwork that Clara created on the left. Mine got a little bit funky, but hopefully turned out ok in the end.

Baby Sings

Yay! I finally got the book dummy done for Baby Sings. This is really different artwork for me. I tried to keep it simple but with some interesting subtleties. Who knows if I pulled it off, but I did get 3 pages and a cover done.

Here is the original art. It will be cropped for the book and those messy edges won't show. It has been fun working a little messier for this book than usual.

And here is the little book itself! It feels good to see it come to life.

Now I'm putting together my portfolio, and then it's the Rocky Mountain Chapter SCBWI Conference in Denver next Saturday. I think I'm going to be ready!

Dropping Art

Last week on September 2nd was World Art Drop Day. I had so much fun getting two of my prints ready to hide in the library!

The one above is an older print of mine that I hid in the picture books with a note. I heard that several of the librarians saw it and would have taken it, but they left it for a patron. It was finally taken the day after I hid it. Hopefully it's gone to a good home!

This print was one I did a few years ago as a submission for the Rocky Mountain SCBWI. They had text to be included, so I left an area above and below blank on the print, scanned it, and added the text on the computer. Then for years I had this print hanging out in my WAAAAAAY too full flat file and it just looked incomplete. I quickly added some hand lettered text while Tessa was eating breakfast and  brought both prints when we went to storytime. This one I hid back in the area that librarians use to prep for crafts. I gave the librarian a hint and told her it was artwork for the library. It was found and it sounds like it is much loved!

This is how it turned out- I like it with the hand lettering!

Repair

I printed one of the linocuts from my Baby Sings dummy and didn't like how it turned out. I can usually print a block with a solid black area using not very much pressure and that creates a lighter textured black. Then I paint over it after it's dried and it looks interesting. But these prints are going on top of a music collage with paste paint. The paint seems to seal the paper and when I print, the ink just sits on top making a heavy and shiny print. I tried to do it lightly so some of the paste paint would show through, but it just looked blotchy. Ick.

So after consulting with my friends, I carved away all of the black. But that left the crib looking strange and awkward to me. Sooooooooo, I decided to pull up some of the linoleum and start over. I've only done this a couple of times ever. I use a lot of glue and once it's dried, the linoleum is really hard to pull up! This is  how it looked:

Then I glued down a new piece of linoleum, transferred the drawing, and carved it.

Here it is carved.

And here it is printed- so much better! It still needs some watercolor, but overall it's a big improvement!