In which there is bronchitis and much painting...
Apologies for the belatedness of the post... Spring break was already quite some time ago, and I am thankfully bronchitis-less. I thought that I had put this up a few weeks ago, but alas I was mistaken. In any case, I spent much of March alternately painting and coughing, and despite the aforementioned bout of plague-style-illness, I got quite a bit of work done.
Thanks to Carl's bit of advice, I forged ahead on my project, decidedly not stalling on making paintings, and over the break, I actually finished two and a half spreads.
The first... I'm feeling just okay about... it may in fact not make it into the final book. (I did another two versions of my dummy this week - which I shall save for a future post - but in both versions, this particular painting didn't make the final cut. I'm glad I rendered it, but we shall see.) The second was incredibly fun to paint, and it shows. The third is the opening page of the book, and was similarly enjoyable.
In which I follow some excellent advice, and though the book's story remains unfinished, full color arrives...
Happy gorgeous and marvelous Saturday everyone! If you are not currently outside, I heartily suggest you postpone reading this silly post and get yourself out of doors. The weather is amazing and deserves appropriate celebration and sun-soaked revelry. As soon as I finish this, I intend to spend the rest of my day definitively out. But let's get to it, shall we?
In the week following the disastrous upside-down-world-flipping meeting, I had a critique class with Marshall and Carl. After I'd hung all of my new dummy spreads on the wall, Marshall told the rest of the class about my meeting with our creative writing teacher, and he said (and of course I am paraphrasing...), "This is something that will happen to all of you. Someone will say something about your work that will turn you on your head. It's inevitable; it happens to everyone. What remains to be seen is how long it keeps you turned around. Is it a week? A month? A year? Your entire career...?" It is an excellent point... how long do you let self-doubt and questioning keep you from doing what you love?
And Carl's comment perfectly complemented Marshall's words. He told us not to let being unsure keep us from making art. Even though I may still be a little up in the air about the direction of the story itself, there are certain pages that I'm already sure I want in the book. Carl's advice was to render them... go paint! Do what makes you happy!
And so I did...
And in doing so made two images that I'm pretty excited about.
Thus dear readers, I shall leave you. Go do what makes you happy and squeeze every bit of awesome out of your Saturday.
Book Project Part II: Delays
In which the project is nearly scrapped and an identity crisis ensues...
Again, apologies for the delay with these. This week was technically Spring "break"... I use the term "break" extremely loosely because break for me meant a week of 8 hr (sometimes 8+, except for Tuesday, when I took the afternoon off) workdays in the studio. As such, I finished three (soon to be four) new paintings for this very project, which I'm not going to post tonight because we have a bit of catching up to do first. Soon, dear readers, soon... all in good time.
So let's get to it, shall we? When I last left you, I had just finished the first dummy for the book. It was fairly complete - a full 32 pages - textless, but complete. And then, then there was the meeting - the meeting that turned everything upside down.
Each of us met with our creative writing teacher, who, when it was my turn, suggested that I scrap my entire project. I'm not going to go into the gory details, but it led to a series of successive identity crises that had me questioning everything from the kind of work I do, how I do it, why I want to do kids' books, if that's really what I want to spend my time on... oof... exhausting. Ultimately I did not scrap the story, but I spent the next three weeks doing heaps of sketches, reworking the story itself, changing it from the inside out, and playing with adding text. In my last post, I mentioned that I felt that the story lacked a central conflict, and while the reworking isn't entirely complete, the story arc is much more solid. So the crisis-inducing meeting, despite turning my world upside-down and inside-out for much of February, ultimately strengthened the story, forcing me to push it further. There is a lot I still have to work out about the story line and actual text of the manuscript, but the ideas are there.
And as I mentioned earlier, only one of the sketches you've seen made it into the book. Post crisis, the new dummy had 30 new illustrations (a number of which, I'm still doing revisions on). Here are a handful of the new images:
After spending so many weeks working out the story and sketching, the next step in my process was to start figuring out how I wanted to render the artwork. Watercolor? Ink? Gouache? Acrylic? So many options! I knew that I wanted a really saturated series of images, so I started looking back at the work I had rendered last term and finally came to Carl's final project - a folding screen rendered on black rag board. Perfect! Because the story takes place at night, the dark board would be perfect for rendering night skies and likewise would help the colors pop and shine in vibrant contrast to the black background. And so I gave it a go, rendering a couple of test illustrations in gouache on bits of board leftover from the Four Seasons screen.
Success!
And thus, I'm on my way.
