RMC SCBWI Conference

Last weekend was the regional conference for the Rocky Mountain Chapter SCBWI in Denver. I had a great time! It's wonderful to see friends that I mostly spend time with online. This year was our chapter's 40th anniversary, so we were very happy to have the SCBWI founders Lin Oliver and Steve Mooser there to speak and help celebrate the anniversary.

For the portfolio display, I had postcards printed by Moo with an image on each side.

And my portfolio was printed by Blurb. It turned out nicely!

There were great speeches and breakout sessions, but other than seeing and spending time with my good friends, my favorite part of the conference was Judy Schachner and her gorgeous character bibles!

For every picture book she creates, Judy makes a book full of collage, sketches, painting, thoughts, and bits of story. This helps her get to know the characters and storyline. The one she brought was for a new story about Sarah Bella. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen!! In the pictures above she is showing some spreads to my friend Dow Phumiruk at the Illustrator's Intensive.

And then we got to make mixed media illustrations ourselves- Dow and I are working furiously in the photo above. Our art was based to this funny prompt that Judy brought:

"Jane AkiKahaleauki herself was sitting in the shade of a tree, sharing a Pepsi with a month-old wild goat called Hoku. "I give him soda and ice cream, but he doesn't like beer," she observed. "I want to teach him to talk."

Here's how mine turned out!

This was everyone in the workshop. The pieces we made were all so different! Thank you so much for the awesome inspiration, Judy!!