How to use this Page

“I wish I were pretty too…” – Coco the Caterpillar
“Don’t we all.” - Slimey

The weather in New York these days has been quite moody (like me …hehe…no seriously)…But sooner or later, there’s a gonna be plenty of days where I get to find one of these stuck in my hair, sliming around our backyard, and fluttering in my room (if I’m lucky!)..I’m hoping to see more flutter than anything else though..

Quick one for the week. No video for this one but I wish I had! The tree and texture adds were a lot of fun to do. Boo… Maybe next week.

Happy Tuesday!

This one is a favorite of my daughter!  She really likes the contrasting colors.

This is my design on  a Ladies Keds Shoe available at my Zazzle Store.   Here’s the link to check out this and many other products!

http://www.zazzle.com/robertabaird/gifts?cg=196588093733611854

per·spec·tive (pr-spktv) n.

Subjective evaluation of relative significance; a point of view.

“Are you content now?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir if you wouldn’t mind,” said Alice: “three inches is such a wretched height to be.”

“It is a very good height indeed!” said the Caterpillar angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high).

“But I’m not used to it!” pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought to herself, “I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!”

“You’ll get used to it in time,” said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

So you thought you used to play 2D games. If you had taken a look behind the screen, then you'd have seen this. The featured game is Rainbow Islands from Taito, a classic 8-bit video game for the arcades, released in 1987.

You're invited to Sevensheaven.nl for more imagery.

From the book I illustrated and written by Michele L. Fisher, here is Zachary with is tiny friend Cali, the caterpillar. Actually she is a tomato worm that he rescued in California and transported home to Florida in a salad on a passenger plane.
Visit Cali's own website, .The Adventures of Cali.

Now that I am happy with this version there is a point where I started...
and I still like this one. It has a simplicity that is perfect for some types of stories. But it evolved a bit to this one next....
and this one is fun too, but it needed something and I also wanted to get a closer view of the children... so that is the first image on the top.

What is the flower that likes summer the best? Ofcourse, it is the sunflower. Here is a whimsical ink drawing featuring the 'portrait of a sunflower family'.

Do you see another family too?

© Trapezoid Art

Illustrating THE ADVENTURES OF CALI was sheer joy for me! The Publisher and author were fantastic to work with, and the story is touching without being sappy. The idea that a little boy actually carried a caterpillar all the way from California's countryside to an apartment in Flordia IN A SALAD was too much fun to pass up. To make the book even more fun the publisher had the printer make the cover illustration of the caterpillar all sparkly. A finger puppet and another toy are coming soon to partner with the book.

Members of the blogosphere (at least the portion I inhabit) are wondering if blogging has had a negative impact on reviewing. This line of thought was inspired by an article in n+1 called The Blog Reflex, which was excerpted at a blog called Jess. (Just out of curiousity, has anyone read the entire article?)

Anyway, Fuse #8 saw the arguments made in The Blog Reflex as being "a slightly rehashed version of the eternal Should a Blogger Post Negative Reviews question that keep popping up."

Read Roger's response was that kidlit bloggers have "created a community of interested parties heretofore unknown in the children's book world...But I'm not sure it has lead to better reviewing: can we truly "all be in this together" at the same time some of us are judging the work of others?"

Here is my spin, which I know everyone is desperate to hear: We should be keeping in mind that the Internet is a different medium. What is published here is not supposed to be the same as what is published in traditional print media. Anyone who is posting "5,000-word critiques of their favorite books and records", as the original n+1 article suggested, hasn't researched her market, as we say in writing. I hate to sound simplistic and simple, but material written for the Internet is supposed to be short. Long stretches of unbroken text are deadly on the Internet.

Readers don't come to blogs to read the equivalent of one of those endless New Yorker articles on say, the quality of literary critism. They come to blogs to learn that those endless New Yorker articles exist and how to get to them should they wish to do so. Literary blogs, in particular, are a sort of directory of, a response to, a conversation about what is being written and read elsewhere and everywhere.

A metaphorical salon, perhaps.

Roger Sutton at Read Roger said in one of his comments that blogging is an "undifferentiated mix of news, gossip, shoutouts, trivia--and reviews." I don't think he meant that to be insulting, and I don't think it is. That is the salon aspect of blogging. The blog is different from other forms of writing. Not better, not worse, different.

Will the "coziness" (again from Roger) of these salons and their blog reviews have some kind of impact on reviewing altogether? I'm not sure. I learned a great deal about writing from reading the New York Times Book Review years ago and not because everything I read there was cozy and positive. Many of the reviews I read (I could get through) indicated a knowledge about writing and literature on the part of the reviewer that went beyond what he or she had to say about that particular book. Blog reviewers may very well have that same knowledge but when they only discuss what they like, they aren't necessarily getting an opportunity to share everything they know. If the coziness of blog reviewing makes the jump to traditional print reviews, I think something very well could be lost.

On the other hand, print reviewers seem to have such a bias against blog reviewers that it's hard to believe they'll be influenced by anything we're doing. In which case, we can all remain in our different worlds doing what we do...differently.