Ocean's Gift

Ah, my kitchen workspace. It's crowded.

It usually looks more like this.  The clutter is typically less pretty, but in this case, my husband had just brought in a giant haul of tomatoes from the garden, and the results were pretty enough to photograph.  The baskets can't go on the floor, because then the toddler gets into the tomatoes.  I have had two tomato seedlings germinate in the bathroom already, thanks to her.

Anyway, as you might guess, this has had me longing for a studio.  If only we could lump the two kids into one bedroom for a while. . .  Well, actually this has been working nicely for the past week.  I thought the two of them would be playing rock-em-sock-em robots sleeping together, but so far, the worst that has happened was when the toddler attempted to nurse on her brother.  Had I not intervened, he may well have done the back stroke right out of bed with her on top.  Mostly, though, they just seem to keep each other sleeping.  Hooray!

So, it is time to get rid of the crib!  And while I fantasize about expensive drafting tables, I'll look at yard sales for basic stuff to stock my space with.

Now, let me interrupt this story with something that happened to me as a pre-teen back in Hawaii.  So, I was on the beach one day.  Yay, another beach.  Hawaii has lots of those.  So I was dorking around with some flotsam  a big piece of wooden vine stuff made soft by the water.  I bent it, twisted it, and voila!  I had made a sort of necklace.  I tried it on.  Then I set it down in the tide, thinking to myself, "a gift to the sea!"

Not five minutes later I reached down to pick up what appeared to be litter in the sand.  It was a necklace.  A fat gold chain, of the sort that some surfer dude would wear his bling on.  With a loose clasp.

I swear, I wouldn't try to pass of such a generic fairy-tale story as truth if it didn't actually happen.  I still have the necklace around here somewhere, if you want to see it.  The clasp still comes loose.  The chain is still ugly.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I had something similar happen just this week.

It started with a notice in the paper about a church yard sale.  Yes!  I have stuff that I desperately want out of my house.  Kid's clothes mostly; so I bagged it all up, and went to load it in the car, when I remembered the itchy, heavy, computer desk chair that came along with the house.  I hoisted that puppy into the Subaru and wiggled it around.  "I should carefully test to see if it fits," my brain said.  Meanwhile my hands were thinking about the kids upstairs.  Without consulting my brain, they reached out and gave the hatch a good slam.

One bucket of glass later, I took a ventilated ride to the church and got rid of the chair once and for all.  Rain fell in the trunk.

So, what did I find at the yard sale that made up for this?  Here is the short list:

One box of hats and purses for the kids to play with.  A pile of kitchen oddments, including cast iron pans.  One big car ramp toy for my son.  One potato bin to get those piles of produce out of my workspace.  Two brass candlesticks.  One swanky metal teapot.  Various Christmas deco items, so that my mother doesn't tell me I'm such a heathen this year.  An entire box of gaudy but not-cheap necklaces, including freshwater pearls.  One antique ivory bracelet, which may someday go on display with my skull collection.

But that's just the bonus stuff.  So what did the rain bring me in exchange for the Subaru's window?

A DRAFTING TABLE!

At this point I feel that it would be most appropriate to present you with a photo of the table.  But it is still crammed into the Subaru. . .  which is right over there, in the garage. . .

It seems this is the best I will be able to do in the dark.  If you use your imagination, you can vaguely see a gray rectangle in there, crossed by a dark band, through the absent window.

Now, if this this were a fictional tale, I would tell you how the table only fit into the car because the window was gone.  That would suitably cap it off as something out of the Brothers Grimm.  But, alas, the table fits in there just fine with or without windows.

So tomorrow, I trade a raven for a writing desk!  I mean a crib for a drafting table!  And to think that just last week I was daydreaming of my own studio with a fancypants art table.  I just had to smash an expensive window to get it.

Confidence

I find that when I stop doing an activity for a few years, and then pick it up again, deep and profound insights about that activity come crashing into me.  This time, it's drawing with a brush.  I never trusted myself to draw with a brush.  There were occasions when I did it, and I had great results - such as a cat study that I painted for my college-entry portfolio way back as a nugget.  But then I would try again and it was like every mark I made was put on the paper with a wet noodle.

Now I get it.  Drawing with a brush is exactly like playing music.  The minute you doubt yourself, you start screwing up your performance.  It takes an absurd belief in yourself to make a confident line.

And part of making this medium work for me involves believing that even if the line isn't at all what I intended, that it's still a good line that I can work with.  As long as I can embrace the flubs and erratic wiggles, then the medium is still mine to do with as I please.

Another part of it is that I have to calm myself in a meditative manner before making the first mark.  Ironically, I seem to be able to do this consistently even though I arrive at each little art session jittery with eagerness to use my precious time well.

Anyway, the above is much more tight than I plan to paint my book illustrations, but it needed to be done.  And the fact that I could do it loads me with more confidence.

And there still is no good way to put wings on a quadruped.

Satomi Ichikawa

One of my research methods has been to simply pick a shelf at the library and go through each book.  I take a quick look at the art style and a quick glance at the text.  If the text is in verse, I take it; if the art style is anything that catches my eye, I take it.

The book pictured above is one with an art style that caught my eye.  The author and illustrator is Satomi Ichikawa, who, surprisingly, has no formal training in art.  She paints in vivid watercolors, sometimes with a touch of outlining, that beautifully capture the details of other cultures.  I took home My Father's Shop and My Pig Amarillo, and reading them gave me all of the same people-watching pleasure as reading an issue of National Geographic.

Her books nicely illustrate how when a writer illustrates her own book, she can leave so much out of the text.  The remaining writing is spare and clean, without redundancy.

Up, Down

Dragons going up!

Dragons going down!

I'll be sad when I start making finished art for this book, because I won't be able to share it online as I go.  (Because no publisher would want to publish something that was swimming about on the Internet, in case you are wondering.)  But for now, I can enjoy sharing my studies.  Stay tuned for more dragons!

A Tale of Two Styles

Image one: five hours of work.  Warm brown on a warm gray paper.  Image two: an hour and a half.  Navy blue on a cool blue paper.  The dragon on the left was done in a half hour flat.

Okay, so there are a few anatomy problems with the right-hand dragon in the second image.  Those hind feet!  Those wings!  But I consider them a worthy trade for the more fluid lines and the sacred increase in speeeeed!

I discovered that, to a degree, I can erase my dark lines by scrubbing at them with a wet brush.  (For those wondering, the medium here is gouache, which is opaque watercolor.)

A non-artist of mine offered the best praise possible: she couldn't tell the difference between the styles of the two images.  My son, who is four, gave what for him would be considered a long and serious look, before commenting, soberly, that "it has too many heads."

My apologies for the poor image quality!  Given the choice between making art or properly documenting it, I must choose the former is I ever hope to get anything done.

I keep getting this giddy thought that I don't have a teacher standing over my shoulder poo-pooing my use of outlines.  I'm getting away with something, and it makes me want to cackle naughty laughter!

Verse Vice

Deep in the grickle grass some people say

if you look deep enough you can still see today

where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could

before somebody lifted the Lorax away.

          -The Lorax, Dr. Seuss

Back before having children, I had a yawning apathy towards verse. My highschool English experience to this day seems like it was aimed to kill my love of reading. But I hesitate to blame school for my dislike of verse. No, the problem with verse is that it is archaic, and archaic literature does so very little for me.

But when I cracked open Dr. Seuss for my son, I was won over by the perfect beauty of anapestic tetrameter! For the first time in my adult life I experienced modern English being used in verse in the setting that verse was made for: performance. Verse has to be spoken aloud to be properly appreciated. Spoken aloud, verse makes English so much more accessible that a three-year-old can memorize great swathes of text that would otherwise be far out of his reading level.

At this point I have to restrain myself, because I am like a convert to a religion: I have this desire to grab people and scream into their faces that I HAVE THE TRUTH ABOUT VERSE! No, the rhyming isn't the important part – not by a long shot! Any schmuck can pick up a rhyming dictionary. It's the rhythm that makes or breaks verse.

Verse meant to be read to children must be almost perfectly even and repetitive in its rhythm in order to be readable on the first try. If the rhythm is sloppy, the reader goes tripping and fumbling and stumbling over the words. By comparison, the “verse” of music can throw in extra beats or leave them out willy nilly because music, generally, is practiced to perfection before being performed. But the parent reading to their child is putting on a performance with no rehearsal.

You know a line of verse has failed when you have to go back to read it out loud a second time. A children's book that gets butchered on a first reading would have been better off written in prose.

A Little at a Time

Here is the same image, this time with highlights added.  I literally finished this with a screaming toddler wrapped around my leg.

Whenever I start a big project, I am hit by a singularly unproductive wave of jittery energy to do everything all at once.  This wave is driven by fear of various sorts: fear that I have to prove myself, fear that my work isn't good enough; fear that I don't have enough time.  Writer Deborah Marcus humorously addresses the latter fear in a recent blog post.  My wave of energy invariably crashes onto the pointy reality that I don't have boundless open time, and leaves me in a funk.

But I have successfully tackled a few long-term projects over the years, and they have given me a road map through the rocks.  First order of business: squelch the wave of jittery energy!  Kill all hopes of accomplishing anything in a hurry!  Doing a little every day or every few days is very very productive over a long period of time.

Prior to having kids, I did a painting a day in oils to learn the medium.  I finished 200-plus paintings over the course of a year.  This I did primarily by hauling myself out of bed at the time of day when I would rather sleep.  Then, while pregnant with my second child, AND working, I wrote and self-published a rather hefty cookbook for food banks to use as a fundraiser. That work was done after Gabe was in bed, and later, after both kids were asleep.  I basically gave up a year of television and games to do that, and it was worth it.

It's nice to be back in the saddle.

Kadir Nelson

My behind-the-timesness really shows when I admit that until this week, I didn't know who Kadir Nelson is.  By chance at the library I pulled two of his books at random from the shelves.  His specialty is African Americans, and wow, the emotional ranges he can portray leaves me stunned.

Above is a scene from Please, Puppy, Please.  Below is Moses, When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom.  These two books could not possibly illustrate better Nelson's range.  One of these stories is a warm fuzzy read.  The other could easily move a reader to tears.

I don't know precisely what medium Nelson uses, but it appears to be oil paints on the top layer.  Under that is pencil and transparent patches of color.  I am immensely attracted to this technique as both a way to preserve the lines of a drawing, and as a way to reach a full-color finished painting without bogging down in unnecessary details.  For example, in page after page in both books, Nelson includes trees as background elements.  Trees represent a monumental problem for painters, because they are made up of millions of individual leaves and branches.  A picture book illustrator can't hope to paint every leaf on a tree and still meet deadlines.  Nelson's approach is to draw the shape of the tree in pencil, scribble in a curly texture that approximates leaves, put a wash of color over that, and then touch up the dark areas with another wash, and the light areas with opaque color.