The Giant's Socks

Here is today's naptime progress.  I found some inspiration in one of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators's previous Golden Kite Award winners:

You wouldn't know it to look at this tiny image, but Watson uses a technique not unsimilar to what I am building towards: a transparent medium on top of a drawing, that is then touched up with a opaque medium.  He uses watercolor and egg tempera, specifically.

I am particularly attracted to the way he handles his drawings.  The lines are painted over with lines of color.  Every object is essentially outlined with a darker shade of the color that it is filled with.  In this way, he carefully preserves his elegant and naturalistic representations of plants and animals, while addig an extra boost of saturation.  The amateur botanist in me swoons at the specific plants elegantly filling the corners of his action scenes!

Although I have no intention of imitating him to this degree, I could spend an hour staring at the knit socks he so lovingly painted onto the giant. Watson rendered each and every thread!

The Great Bill Peet

I don't remember reading Bill Peet's picture books as a child. But as I read them now, with every turn of the page comes a trickle of long-lost memory. At this point I have revisited at least a dozen of his books, and I am forced to conclude that I must have read all thirty-some of them once upon a time, with one interesting exception.

Bill Peet's stories are occasionally in verse - the Caboose who got Loose being perhaps his most noteworthy. His verse, when he uses it, is clunky. He has a tendency to force a stress onto the wrong word in a familiar word pair, such as train WRECK instead of TRAIN wreck. He also sometimes adds or drops syllables at random, trashing the rhythm he just established.

The Kweeks of Kookatumdee has such pervasive rhythm issues that reading it out loud to my kids was an exercise in futility. Prose would have been easier to read aloud! Since the whole point of verse is the reading out loud experience, Kweeks shoots itself right in the foot.

And yet Peet tells such marvelous stories! Kweeks is one of my favorites, dealing with a flock of flightless birds living on an island which has but a single food-producing tree. After failing to mediate themselves, they fight over the food. One bird grows grows gargantuan while the others get so thin that they can finally fly away.

It's a didactic story, but it is also wide open to interpretation. Was Peet talking about gluttony? Bullies? Communism versus capitalism? The roots of warfare?

My own manuscript is crafted similarly. It is didactic, but different (adult) readers are going to walk away from it with different messages.

Hopefully, not too many will find my story offensive. That is the danger of treading into didactic territory. Even Bill Peet, who I would at this point call my role model, wrote stories that leave me cold. Chiefly among them is the Caboose who got Loose, featuring a female caboose who bemoans her life of being towed about. The only action she takes in the entire story is her decision to accept her miserable, passive situation. I would call it sexism, but the main character in Chester the Worldly Pig makes the same non-action, deciding gruesomely to return to a farmer and await his slaughter. Think that's creepy? Add to that Peet's admission that Chester is essentially an autobiography dressed up as fiction, and you get a downright tragic glimpse into the mental workings of the author.

I had mentioned that there is one interesting exception to Peet's books. Bill Peet wrote an actual non-fiction autobiography. And he did it in picture book format. Bill Peet: an Autobiography, is a massive tome by picture book standards – almost 200 pages! And Peet didn't pull the teeth from his life's story to change it into fuzzy bedtime stories: on page one he writes about his father abandoning the family. Growing up poor, limping through school, an oppressive grandfather, the Depression, working working always working, and a 27-year string of miserable experiences while working for Walt Disney; these are the dark gems of his life that he captured in drawings and presented as children's reading material!

I don't mean to sound disproving. On the contrary, I am thrilled to see that the children's book industry is so open to dark and honest subject matter. Not only did this unlikely work of children's literature get published, it won a Caldecott!

Mostly, I am thrilled for the chance to see into the professional history of an author and illustrator whose work I find both so admirable and so frequently flawed. Peet was an animator and storyboard artist first, a visual story-teller second, and only after much effort did he finally become a writer. And he reinvented himself, methodically trying out multiple avenues for his his artistic bent before becoming a parent and, in reaction, finding a comfortable second career in chidren's books.

Perhaps I can do the same.

Sketches and Plato

I am pleased with my drawing progress. Here are two studies of my main characters, in plain-Jane no. 2 pencil, on gray paper. Next I will try a combination of watercolors and gouache as I did with the last study. But this time I will be letting the gray of the paper pull its own weight. The purpose of the dark paper is so that I don't have to cover the entire surface with paints, which takes time, and isn't the best use of watercolor. 

Most of my story takes place in a cave, which means a lot of dark images. Then I can switch to white paper for the above-ground parts of the story.

Speaking of caves, one of my readers asked me if I was familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave. I looked it up, and wow! I have quite by chance rewritten a story that I had never read. Plato's allegory involves people in a cave, watching shadows.  Mine involves dragons in a cave, with hoarded treasure playing the role of Plato's shadows.

If I were a novice, I would now be quaking in my socks, wondering if this were plagiarism or copyright infringement. Or I would be wallowing in fear that woe-is-me I must be too unoriginal to be a professional. At this, I now laugh! I could certainly have deliberately rewritten Plato's allegory both ethically and legally. As for originality, hah! There is nothing new under the sun. The art of writing lies in making the old stuff sound new.  (Incidentally that was only one of two things I learned from Shakespeare.  The other thing was a list of archaic naughty words.)

No, the me of now does not in any way find this distressing. Let me put this another way: I have unintentionally reinvented a story written by none other than Plato! I mist permit myself, for a moment, to wallow in some fat, juicy ego, because right now I seriously rock. 

Removing Artist's Block

Closing in on a style.

After having noodled around with a few drawing and painting styles, I have come to some major conclusions. Conclusion one: college convinced me that my home-grown approach to drawing was somehow inferior to what they had to teach. As a result, I switched styles repeatedly in college. But my original approach still results in both a process and product that I prefer.

Conclusion two: my strength is in drawing. By choosing opaque finishing mediums, chiefly acrylic and oil paints, I was making a ton of unnecessary work for myself, because the bulk of my time spent painting went into tediously protecting my drawing. And the times when bad painting obliterated a good drawing were heartbreaking, and unavoidable.

Conclusion three: worrying about the archival properties of mediums has held me back. I always saw watercolor as less permanent, and therefore less worthy of my time.

Conclusion four: somewhere along the way I got the notion that a good grasp of anatomy is both entirely necessary, and can only be maintained with an endless stream of life drawings. These ideas gave me an underlying feeling that due to my lack of willingness to be a 24-hour art machine, I could never succeed as an illustrator. In reality, had I spent a little time reading children's picture books or viewing other professional illustration outside of my narrow range of interest, I would have seen how bogus these ideas are.

These blocks will not hold me back any longer.

Loosen Up

An experiment in spontaneity and speed.

Anyway. I have a manuscript. I am making art. Ironically, given that my education was in illustration, I am struggling with the art. And old dichotomy is rearing its head: either I can enjoy the product of my efforts, or I can enjoy the process. In college, and then after that in the games industry, I had a habit of knuckling down and grinding through to get the product that I was after. The actual art-making process could be so tedious, I had to actively use music to pound my brain into submission while I worked. This time around I intend to have a more healthy relationship with my art.

Coincidentally, if I expect to make more than minimum wage as an artist, I need an art style that isn't glacially slow. This is why your typical children's book looks more like Dr.Seuss than Dinotopia. Seeing as I learned how to paint by studying Dinotopia, I have to set out in a direction that is quite new to me.

College-me would have turned her nose up at choosing a simple art style for economy. The me of now is ready and willing! But where to start? I have been messing around with watercolors, gouache, pens, and pencils. Oddly enough, I may have to try black bic pen next. College me would have gagged. But if the ink can play well with watercolor, it's a process that I know would be fast. I drew a whole perspective tutorial for conceptart.org in bic, and much of that without pencil. So, it's worth further investigation.

Practice

I do my best writing while nursing the baby,
I tap out the words with my thumb;
The dishes neglected, a diaper needs changing,
The shower is coated with scum.
Though Facebook is calling and laundry need doing,
Instead I'm attempting to rhyme;
My Swiss-army smart phone allows me to wrangle
The very best use of my time.


Here is one of my attempts to work out character and art style for my picture book, as well as a snippet of doggerel to practice meter.

Here Goes

                                        

My workspace competes with produce from the garden.

I am a writer and illustrator of children's books. While I may be no professional yet, in the sense that I have not been neither published nor paid to do these things, I can't get published without first doing a great deal of work. Thus, since I am already doing the work, it is already my profession. Therefore it would be in my best interest to start cultivating a professional attitude towards what I am doing.

Never mind that I am doing my writing on my smart phone while nursing, and painting on the kitchen table while the baby naps. If Stephen King admits that his writing/life balance didn't work until he traded the grand central mahogany desk for a family sofa and a bitsy workspace shoved into a corner, then I certainly won't be ashamed that my setup might look like a hobby setup to some layman whose opinion doesn't matter to me anyway.

But I suppose I should introduce myself before getting into details. My name is Michelle Clay. I have written blogs, newspaper articles, and a cookbook. I spent a decade making computer games. I got my bachelor's degree in illustration. I have done my homework on the children's book industry, and know that I am likely facing a year of queries and rejections before, if I am lucky, I get a small advance. I know that if I work my ass off and get seriously lucky, I might be able to produce a steady income of perhaps half of what I was making previously. Fame and fortune? Hah! Like I said, I've done my homework.

This blog is to be my professional attitude blog, to remind myself that what I am doing is real work, with a concrete goal: publication. And not just once. I want this to be a career. Here goes.