PiBoIdMo 2012 - Winner!

I do solemnly swear that I have faithfully executed 
the

PiBoIdMo 30-ideas-in-30-days challenge,


and will, to the best of my ability, 
parlay my ideas

into picture book manuscripts.

My third year of participating in Picture Book Idea Month (#PiBoIdMo) was another success. And, once again, I find myself thinking… this is really something I should do more regularly – keep a PB idea list going all year long. I still haven't found a way to make it a regular practice, but I think it'll definitely be on my 2013 Resolutions to find a way to make this happen!

And of course, I'm interested in the follow-through of the these ideas. Even if they're only dummies, turning these ideas into completed books is the next big challenge!

I can't believe it's been a whole year since the last PiBoIdMo, and here we are at the end of another one. I've done a lot in the past year, including completing my first finished picture book (as illustrator only), signing on with an illustration agency, visiting the SCBWI-LA Conference for the first time (and as an SCBWI Volunteer), and reading over 200 picture books (as a self-study project to just read more PBs regularly - I posted about it here and here). I did start writing a few of my own picture books, but haven't gotten very far with them yet. I keep stopping myself. It's the one step I haven't figured out how to approach, but I  continue to try and in the meantime – I'm keeping the new ideas rolling in and ready for me when I do figure out the right process for myself, to write AND illustrate my own stories.

New Work & Show Opening Tonight!

Hello!… 3.75"x3.75" - a brand new mixed media experiment.

It's time for our local New Mexico CPSA District Chapter Annual Show again, generously hosted by the Old School House Gallery! I submitted three pieces this year, including my Sleep Bears piece and these two new pieces. I hope to see a great crowd there tonight!

Snow Buddies… 5"x7" - some of you may recognize this as the
original drawing used for my Christmas card last year.

Pencil Nubbins: What to do?

I'm giving the advice/tutorial blog post a try – let me know if you like it!

nubbins, nubbins, everywhere

Being a colored pencil artist, I've developed quite a collection of pencil nubbins - you know, the stubs left over when you just can't sharpen them anymore? For most colored pencil brands, this generally isn't too much of an issue, they're pretty cheap and easy to replace. But there's still a lot of waste involved, not only in the nubbin ends, but tip breakage and leads that creak inside the barrel. It's frustrating!

In the last few years though, I've upgraded my pencil stock to Caran d'Arch's Luminance 6901 pencils. These are the créme de la créme of colored pencils (IMHO). There are all kinds of technical and longevity benefits to using these pencils, besides the brilliant smooth color and ease of use in burnishing and blending. They have the best light-fast ratings on the market (probably the #1 reason color pencil is looked down upon as an artistic medium) and there's a lot less breakage inside the pencil. Unfortunately, these advantages show through in the price, about $4 per pencil. It usually adds up to a  a small fortune for me when I'm restocking. So I want to save & use every little bit I can.

There are lots of pencil extension tools on the market, but most of these products can be made from household items and scraps if you have the drive, know-how, and time to experiment and find what works for you.

some current consumer products to aid in pencil extension

the tools i use

I've always made my own pencil extenders from used-up ball point pen tubes. Just remove the pen tip & ink well from one end, and the cap from the opposite end. These tubes are general a bit smaller that the barrels of colored pencils, so depending on your level of comfort, you can either chew the end of the pen tube until it's flexible enough to wedge a pencil in (just let it set for a bit and you can easily exchange pencils) –or– use a candle flame to soften the pen-tube ends and expand them with an awl or screw driver and gradually enlarge the openings on either end, until the pencil fits snuggly. As long about about a quarter inch of the pencil fits in the tube, it should offer sturdy use.

However, no matter what you use to extend your pencils, you eventually get to a point where you can't sharpen them anymore, they're just too short to hold AND turn a sharpener. I've ended up with tons of little nubbins of the colors I use most. *I never throw them away - I've used them in craft projects and various other things… but ideally, I'd like to find a way to use them up in my artwork! When I saw the Glu-it To-it product online, I thought it was a pretty clever solution, but being the thrifty/crafty artist I am, I thought it might be a pretty easy thing to make myself (and by that I mean I KNOW someone that works with wood regularly, has scraps and know-how – and I asked him if this would be a relatively easy project: he did, thanks Dad!). 

It's a simple concept, a narrow wood block with a pencil-barrel-size channel cut in it, and one area hollowed out as a waste/glue-drip well (so your pencil doesn't end up clued inside the channel). Simply put a little crazy glue on one end and hold the ends together until the glue sets (which is pretty quickly). Now you can keep sharpening the nubbin all the way to the end!  

this is how it works

There does come a point when there's so little of the glue left that the joint breaks, but in my first try it lasted until the very tip, which saved me about ¾" of pencil. That doesn't sound like much, but I either go through a LOT of pencils where these nubbins add up (white for instance, I probably have one or two whole pencils worth of white nubbins) … or I run down to a nubbin of color I'm currently using and I need to order another that will take a few days to arrive – using this technique just might hold me over until the replacement arrives!

So, did you find this post helpful & informative? I hope so… because I really should be working on a few other projects and the "procrastination blog-post monster" took over! ;)

PiBoIdMo 2012!

So, I haven't posted in a few weeks, it's just been madly busy. But it's that time of year again, and time to spread the word — PiBoIdMo 2012 is upon us! 

So get out your pens, notebooks, or computers ready and head over to Taralazar.com to find out more about PiBoIdMo. This will be my third year participating. I'm not much of a writer (yet), but I'm so thankful the month-long guest blog posts, inspiration, and support PiBoIdMo provides. I have 60 ideas just waiting for me to turn them into amazing books thanks to the driving force of this event and I'm about to add 30 more. I can't wait!

Sign yourself up here or just follow-along privately on your own.

Reading & work… reading & work…

It's been a pretty hectic week… I'm working on several rather large illustrated map projects – which I love, but they seem to be all-time-consuming, leaving with very little energy to check in here and often as I'd like. That and I've been going through an "I-hate-everything-I-draw period" which is always frustrating.

But in the meantime, I've still been reading plenty of picture books, more than 10 this past week.

• DANNY AND THE DINOSAUR – Syd Hoff  *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• THE PHILHARMONIC GETS DRESSED – Karla Kuskin / Marc Simont *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• THE SNOWMAN – Raymond Briggs Classic, what more can be said? *from Steven Malk's list.
• CHRYSANTHEMUM – Kevin Henkes *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• I'LL FIX ANTHONY – Judith Viorst / Arnold Lobel *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• MISS NELSON IS MISSING – Harry G. Allard Jr. / James Marshall *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• TED – Tony DiTerlizzi 
• WILD ABOUT BOOKS – Judy Sierra / Marc Brown 
• BADGER'S FANCY MEAL – Kieko Kasza 
• THE DOG THAT CRIED WOLF – Kieko Kasza 
• SCAREDY SQUIRREL – Melanie Watt 
• TOOT & PUDDLE, A PRESENT FOR TOOT – Holly Hobbie *from Steven Malk's list (LASCBWI12)
• WHAT NEWT COULD DO FOR TUTLE – Jonathan London / Louise Voce 

• GERALDINE, THE MUSIC MOUSE – Leo Lionni
• IN THE RABBIT GARDEN – Leo Lionni 
• THEODORE AND THE TALKING MUSHROOM – Leo Lionni 
• THE ALPHABET TREE – Leo Lionni 
• INCH BY INCH – Leo Lionni 
• LITTLE BLUE AND LITTLE YELLOW – Leo Lionni 
• CYRUS THE UNSINKABLE SEA SERPENT - Bill Peet *I am a long time, huge, Bill Peet fan from childhood. Every time we went to a book store I looked for a new Bill Peet book. *from Steven Malk's list.
• CHESTER'S MASTERPIECE – Melanie Watt 
• AUGUSTINE – Melanie Watt 

*I'm in the middle of one of my first official responsibilities as SCBWI-NM's Illustrator Coordinator: organizing a 2013 Illustrator's Day event for our region. Patti Ann Harris, from Little Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, has graciously agreed to come visit us in NM next year and we're currently planning the event together. As part of this process, I've been reading up on some of Patti Ann's other SCBWI appearances – including the big SCBWI Winter conference in New York, beautifully recapped by my friend Leeza Hernandez here, and SCBWI-Austin, as well as some of the books she's worked on:

• SUBSTITUTE CREACHER – Chris Gall 
• SHARK VS. TRAIN – Chris Barton / TomLichtenheld 
• DAVE THE POTTER – Laban Carrick Hill / Bryan Collier 
• WHEN BOB MET WOODY – Gary Golio / Marc Burckhardt 

*Books I already own/have read, that are also part of Patti Ann's list:
ME… JANE – Patrick
DINOTRUX – Chris Gall

Reading Picture Books, Sans Kid/s

So, I've be a "pre-published" picture book illustrator for more years than I'd like to admit (shortly to to be remedied, hangin' in until November-ish, I think). But after Steven Malk's talk at the the SCBWI LA conference since summer, I brought home his "30 PICTURE BOOKS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW" list and I realized that I really don't read enough picture books. Sure I always pick up a few when I walk into any bookstore, but that's all haphazard and casual, not a conscious effort. So, along with a couple of my critique group partners, I've decided to work picture-book-reading-time into my weekly routine. The goal is at least 10 per week, but sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less, I just fit in what I can. The library is such a blessing. I have to say, the Hold/Inter-Library-Loan system makes it a lot easier for me, even if I do look funny running in and out of the library with massive piles of picture books and no kid attached. I hit the limit a couple weeks back when I checked out my 50th book (that's 50 books checkout AT ONE TIME … *although it took me a couple visits to reach that ;), oops!
So, here are some images to catch you all up on the several weeks this has been going…

Library session #1

Library session #2
+ a small Crockett Johnson book-a-thon

Library session #3
a MASSIVE Leo Lionni book-a-thon
*can you tell I'm also reading The Girl with the Brown Crayon?

Bookstore Session #1, for some fresh new flavors!

Library session #4
+ some more Crockett Johnson love
*starting to mix in suggestions/books my crit partners are reading

Library session #5
+ mixing in suggestions/books my crit partners are reading
*also re-read two childhood-favorite classics, just 'cause I love them

iFri Afternoon (9/21)

Kind of a whirlwind week here … including fun design projects (super-cute booklets and maps!), quotes and contracts for illustration projects (not as much fun, cough-cough), and diving into the World of WordPress (not unlike some torture devices I've heard of)! AH!
I'm lucky to end each and every week with a scheduled Friday afternoon Illustration Friday session at a local coffee house with my colleagues at Tangerine Café. Although yesterday's #iFri session turned out to be more of a wordpress workshop, I'm not complaining – that stuff will come in handy!
I grabbed a new sketchbook (not moleskin, shocker!) and doodled until I filled a page, testing out some new pen & pencils samples I got last week at a CPSA meeting with Prismacolor Rep, Shelley Minnis. Most of this is stream-of-consciousness / idea generating chicken-scratch – but a solid idea did take root and I hope to keep working on it today at our regularly scheduled monthly CPSA meeting (CPSA-DC219, ABQ).

Sketching for #ifri for a change!!

So, this talking about stuff I'm doing thing, here on the blog – do you like it? Is this stuff even remotely interesting in the least? I've never really used the blog of discussion before, it's always just been a way to share sketches and extras that aren't 'portfolio' work.
After a crazy-busy summer work schedule and ignoring my blog for 3 months, I'm trying to make an effort to post here more often – especially since I discovered I have nearly 40 people subscribed to it!  (thanks folks!) Let me know what you think. ;)