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"I don’t want to worry about paying for those big names but I’m starting a publisher because I also want the freedom to put forward my ideals forward. After a certain size, your idealism becomes a liability if you’re looking to make money."

Yesterday, the Comics Beat broke the news that writer Ulises Fariñas had partnered with Magnetic Press to start Buño, a brand new comics publishing imprint that aims to bring beautiful books from diverse creators to audiences around the world.  The first of those books is Light, a word-less graphic novel written and illustrated by Rob Cham. […]

"We’re going to publish comics that are fresh and unexpected. We are going to make the kind of books you can make when you have 100% creative freedom.”

Hi, folks. Today I'm putting my writer hat aside and my creative hat too. I'm placing that reader hat on my head. Here I'm going to talk about something I don't chat about much.  I love to read. I read every day of my life. I mark off the days to a book I want to read is ready to be published. My live revolves around stories, true and fiction. There is nothing that waters my life more than books.

I'm not a high brow reader.  I occasionally read a book that is called literary fiction, but most of the time, I like children's books and genre fiction, most of all historical, historical romance and science fiction.  I occasionally binge on non-fiction.  I have had entire decades devoted to mysteries and thrillers.  I never like horror. I like the classics and read one or two a year. I read a few fantasies every year too. Occasionally, I just like an author and I read every thing they have ever written.

In books, I have lived thousands of lives. I faced thousands of problems. I've inhabited the lives of  so many and I am so much more this.

 I feel like I've survived the Battle of Talavera in 1800s Spain, and at the same time, the intrigues of Russian noblemen is the times of Peter. The history of the Netherlands for thousands of years boils in my blood. I've seen the pyramids built and inhabited huts with my fellow slaves. I lived in the bogs of Ireland thousands of years ago struggling against my harsh gods. The stories of ages inhabit my soul.

I've felt Mr. Darcy's pride and Elizabeth Bennet's prejudice. I've been with Jane and heard Edward's mystic cries through time and space.  I've survived bombings while working with my true love.  I've been broken to shards and found love with someone also as broken as me. I've missed huge swaths of life, frozen with fear, and found the fortitude to love again. So many stories.

I've traveled to the far reaches of the galaxy. I've fought aliens, terra-formed planets, and discovered the ruins of ancient species. I've been sold into slavery and been rescued by an intergalactic cop. Apocalyptic nuclear winters, jungle green worlds, the harsh conditions of Mars, I've lived in a myriad of unique environments, survived, thrived and sometimes died. Like the intense electromagnetic radiation of the sun, the heart of all life. Speculative stories have transformed me.

I've sat on the bones of dead children waiting for rescue from a white mouse. I've had my memories stolen from me and forged a new life. My puppy fell out of an airplane once! Oh, one of my best friends is spider and I might be some pig. I care too much and call it love.  I've opened my heart and believe that someone will come. I am stronger than I think, and I may not belong in the zoo but there is a place for me.  I like your hat, I understand the price, and know stories are light in this dark, dark, world.

Books water the soul. They expand horizons and open my eyes to the distance shores.  They encourage me to be more, to accept myself and others, and believe in happiness with good things beyond the bright light of last moments on Earth.

Pick up a book and read till your heart is content!

Next week a new series starts. Exciting news! A guest blogger will usher in the month of May with Bloom! Excellent author Alexandria La Faye will be here! If you don't know her  books already, please check her out!!! Edith Shay! Strength of saints!  Strawberry Hill!  So many fab stories. www.facebook.com/alafayeauthorwww.alafaye.com, [email protected]

Here is a doodle.

Einstein has had a good month, all things considered. His century-old prediction, that the very fabric of space and time can support waves travelling at light-speed, was confirmed by the LIGO collaboration. More, the bizarre and horrifying consequences of his theory of gravity, the singularly-collapsed stars that came to be called ‘black holes’, have been directly detected for the first time.

The post Questions, questions, questions… appeared first on OUPblog.

Welcome to part four of my series on the making of The Story I’ll Tell. (Read down to the end of the post for the first print giveaway!) And now: color.

The Story I’ll Tell weaves a lyrical tapestry of fantasy and reality, and I wanted the palette of the illustrations to match the lush, dreamlike quality of the manuscript. I noticed early on that the story alternated between daytime and nighttime scenes, and I knew this would become an important element in the illustrations.

Reference images were the starting point. These Ukiyo-e prints were the inspiration for the blue nighttime pages. Matching the color was not a priority so much as capturing the mood of the image. I tied to imagine how it might feel, physically and emotionally, to step into these peaceful nighttime scenes.

Left: "Moonlight, Soochow," Elizabeth Keith, 1924. Right: "Moon at Arakawa River," Hasui Kawase, 1929.

Once I knew what I was going for, I made a detailed color study for each image Photoshop. I find this useful for getting the value range correct. (For those not familiar with art terminology, value is the measure of how light or dark something is. Not to be confused with saturation, which is a measure of how vivid the color’s hue is.) Ideally I want the illustrations to read just as clearly in black and white as they do in color, and good value organization is essential. Coloring an image in Photoshop is such a mindless activity that I listened to quite a few audiobooks during this phase. Then I made a full-color, printed dummy.

I ended up lightening the value of the background for the final art in order to make the figures more visible.

Finally, I painted color studies and chose an overall palette for the book. I wanted to use similar pigments throughout the book, and I needed a blue that could work either with a warm (daytime) or cool (nighttime) color palette. I tried quite a few combinations before I settled on Holbein’s French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow light, and Winsor Red, with other colors as needed. I went through a tube and a half of blue.

Experimentation is key

Okay, you’ve been waiting for it: it’s giveaway time! Leave a comment for a chance to win a giclée print from the book. (It has to be a real comment. If it’s about Louis Vuitton handbags or search engine optimization, I’ll delete it.) Winner will be announced this Friday, October 23. And if you don’t win this time, you’ll have another chance next week with my final installment in the series.

Coming up next: Painting with Guts! The final art, and how to avoid being wimpy with watercolor.

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Color Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

Hi, folks. This has been my unfortunate refrain for a while: my heart aches. I've worked hard as a creative person and believe I have little to show for it. It's tough when the lowliest worker makes more than me. For sure, I've made mistakes on my creative journey, and those mistakes have cost me, but I have always believed my gift would make a place for me. Instead, I've found shut doors. This has led to more than a few nights, sitting in my rocking chair and staring of into the dark night.

Light occupies a central place in our understanding of the world both as a means by which we locate ourselves in nature and as a thing that inspires our imagination. Light is what enables us to see things, and thus to navigate our surroundings. It is also a primary means by which we learn about the world – light beams carry information about the constituents of the universe, from distant stars and galaxies to the cells in our bodies to individual atoms and molecules.

The post 6 things you didn’t know about light appeared first on OUPblog.

Parmenides, in the Way of Mortal Opinion, envisions the sensible world to be governed by Fire and Night, understood as cosmic principles. As a consequence, Parmenides conceives of the colors as themselves mixtures of light and dark. Parmenides’ view, here, is in line with an ancient tradition dating back at least to Homeric times.

The post The philosophy of perception appeared first on OUPblog.

I do love a book full of holes.

Tights with holes? No thank you.

A bike tyre with a hole? What a pain.

But a book with holes? Yes PLEASE!

There are some all-time classic books with holes in them: Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar and the Ahlbergs’ Peepo. More recently there’s the exuberant Peck, Peck, Peck by Lucy Cousins, which I adore. But a new contender to join the ranks of honourably holey hits is It’s an Orange Aardvark! by Michael Hall.

The tale of a small colony of carpenter ants chewing holes in a tree stump, this book covers everything from learning about colours and similes to group dynamics and animal biology. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read which explores both curiosity and fear. It really packs a great deal within its covers at the same time as being a visual and tactile treat.

A band of formic brothers are creating holes in their stump to look out on the world outside their home. One is enthusiastic to see what lies beyond their threshold. Another is terribly worried about the dangers that lurk beyond their known and safe world. As they make each window their stump is flooded with colour. What could be the cause of this? Is it something to embrace and delight in or could it be a threat?

The naysayer is convinced there is an existential threat to them all in the form of an aardvark waiting to gobble them up. As each different colour floods the stump, this poor ant must come up with increasingly outrageous explanations; could it really be a (blue) pyjama-wearing, (red) ketchup carrying, orange aardvark guiding a group of green geckos?

With a hint of Klassen-style ambiguity in the ending (what really was the source of all the colour?) this book is full of delicious tension, punctured with lots of humour as well as holes which let the colour flood from one page to the next. The bold illustrations appear to be made from collage, mixing watercolour and tissue paper. The torn edges suggesting the tree stump sides give an additional handmade, personal feel to the images, and the use of black and grey pages ensures the colours sing and pulse as they shine through.

The somewhat American language (“Sweet!”, “Neat!”) may niggle some readers elsewhere in the world but this is a small price to pay for such an inventive, enjoyable read. I do hope it will be released as a board book so that it can be fully explored with the fingers, hands and mouths not just of aardvarks but also of the youngest book devourers.

Taking the lead from the concentric rings of colour flooding through each hole as it is created in the tree stump, we used tissue paper circles of various sizes to create suncatchers which explored colour depth. You can buy ready cut shapes of tissue paper, but we used regular sheets and cut out a series of circles of various sizes using plates, bowls and mugs as our templates.

We layered our circles over a sheet of contact paper large enough to then fold back over the concentric circles to enclose them entirely in see-through plastic. An alternative would have been to use laminator sheets, if you have ones which are larger enough for your largest circle.

Once a we had a selection of coloured tissue paper/contact paper circle sandwiches we stuck them on our patio doors and let the light flood through them.

Whilst making our concentric sun catchers we listened to:

Other activities which would go well with reading It’s an Orange Aardvark! include:

What’s your favourite book with holes in it? What’s the most annoying (non book) hole you’ve ever discovered?

Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of this book by the publisher.

by Nikki McClure

published 2014 by Abrams Books (reissue)

Every soul who has seen Nikki McClure’s art has loved it. I’m sure there are studies and statistics on that, trust me. It looks as elegant on an iPhone case as it does on a gift tag or greeting card.

But then there are books, and thank goodness she makes them.This edition of Collect Raindrops has been reissued in an expanded form and a new format. It’s based on her ongoing calendar series, and begs to take up permanent residence on your coffee or bedside table. Don’t just stick it on the shelf. You’ll want this one at easy reach. It’s gorgeous to touch, to see, and to behold.

 Here, her pictures are gathered by their season, each introduced with love letters to their very time and place.

“Some people just need help to see the obvious. And that’s what artists are for.”

That sentiment comes from this short film that demystifies her process but reveals a lot of magic. She calls it corny, but I call it lovely:

She says her paper cuts are like lace, and everything is connected. Before it’s in a book, can’t you picture what that art looks like held up against a light? Physically, the paper that remains envelops the paper that is gone. Like knots, or filaments, or branches. How beautiful then, that her subject is often community. Shared memories and experiences.

The contrast is what connects us. As much story lives in what’s been carved away as what sticks behind. But by simple definition, contrast means difference, and in design, your brain is searching for dominant elements. This art contrasts light and dark, filled and white space, and in those separations paints a portrait of community.

And then there’s the case cover itself. A web, a symbol itself of creativity and connection, binds the pages together.

Isn’t that remarkable?

• Check out Brain Pickings recent feature of Collect Raindrops here.
• Here’s a look at the previous edition’s cover.

Tagged: abrams, collect raindrops, contrast, light, negative space, nikki mcclure, paper cut

Remember in the 70′s when some white-haired old men in polyester suits said that if you spun your evil rock & roll records backwards, you could hear embedded devil lyrics that would worm their way deep inside the unsuspecting soul. Backwards masking! Subliminal hellfire! My friends and I spent hours pulling at our turntables hoping to find something through all of the garbled, warped noise. In the end, the buffoons probably boosted record sales more than anything else.

But why are we fascinated? Why do we spend time, energy, and emotion looking for bad?

Abe Lincoln once said, “If you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will.”

Yeah, you don’t have to look hard to find bad. It’s everywhere. So, when you stumble upon it, as you inevitably will, what do you do with it? Shout at it? I can’t find where Jesus said we were to shout at the darkness. What good does that do? “Hey darkness, uh… you’re dark!” I do see the Sermon of the Mount where Jesus said we were to shine a light in the darkness. There is quite a difference between the two.

^Matthew5:16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Shouting only makes noise, while shining a light shows direction.

Shouting creates confusion, light dispels fear.

Shouting is angry, sharing light is love defined.

♦

My oldest daughter told me about a “preacher” out west who has decided that the Disney movie Frozen is going to make us all gay with its hidden agenda. Before I address him, I want to give you my review of the movie. I really liked it. It was like Up - I had few expectations going in but I walked away loving it. Olaf cracked me up, the story was compelling, and the music was beautiful. Now that the Bluray has come out, I’ve seen it again and I still like it. (oh no, I said ‘come out’, what’s happening to me?) It’s a very sweet story and I think anyone finding an agenda simply has one of their own. They are searching for substance out of shadows.

I had originally quoted some of what the shouter said here, but I don’t want to give air to such blather, especially since he admits he has not seen the movie. I will give one quote for the sole purpose of mocking it:

“If I was the Devil, what would I do to really foul up an entire social system and do something really, really, really evil to 5- and 6- and 7-year-olds in Christian families around America?…If I was the Devil, I would buy Disney in 1984, that’s what I would have done.”

I read The Screwtape Letters. I know C.S. Lewis, and you, sir, are no C.S. Lewis.

But maybe.  Just maybe… if I were the devil, I’d sit back in an ivory tower and in the name of religion spew ridiculous insinuations that make the church of Jesus Christ seem like a bunch of backwards, unloving idiots that no one in their right mind would want to be a part of. Yeah, that’s what I’d do.

Look around, Rev. Shouterson, this tactic seems to be working.

This post is a bit out of the norm for me. I typed it while ticked off and debated whether to trash it. I even made a new (hopefully seldom-used) category called ‘Don’t Blog Angry’ for it when I decided to push publish. Uh, enjoy – I guess?

Photo Credit: Fyrsten (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

A rare day-off for Lincoln's Birthday, the big kids all gone to friends' houses, and a little sunshine on the front patio means that my littlest can have fun playing out front while mom updates things on the laptop.

Spring flowers have already arrived.

I think it's done - but I'm still not happy with the leaf - I'll just tweak it a little...

Quick! What’s behind you right now? Did you peek over to see desks, the wallpaper, students, books, or toys? Were those objects there even before you looked at them? Are they there now, even though you’re reading this instead of seeing them? As strange as it sounds, some scientists believe that nothing exists definitely until someone measures it, such as you did with your eyes and ears. These scientists work in a field of science called Quantum Mechanics.

In the early 1900s, smarty-pants scientists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg studied, experimented and argued over the question of what light was made of. Light was very mysterious to scientists at the time, because in some experiments it acted like a wave, similar to the invisible radio and magnetic waves all around us. In other experiments though, light acted like a particle, a solid object like a Pop Tart, a textbook, a penny, a skyscraper… Anything that’s in one place and that weighs something is a particle. It didn’t seem to make sense for something to be an invisible wave and a solid particle at the same time, but in test after test, light was both! You might think it was time for these scientists to turn in their labcoats and get new jobs… this was too hard to figure out! Instead of giving up though, the scientists continued experimenting and studying the subject until they found a solution: light is a wave until it gets observed, then it becomes a solid particle!

This was huge news for scientists. If light acts like this, then other solid objects may not be so solid after all too. The scientists studying Quantum Mechanics presented this thought-provoking possibility: that that the world is actually a wave of possibilities until we observe it, then it becomes the solid place we can feel, touch, taste and smell. It’s a bit like hiding trash under your bed: if you can’t see it, it’s not there!

Hello everyone, first I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year. It has been a hard year for many of us and lots had happened. Now is the time to start a fresh in 2013. I want to welcome Scholastic Inc. to my every growing publisher list. I am very happy to have them aboard. Last update I reviewed three Young Adult Novels. In this update I will be reviewing three picture books. 

Picture Books

1) "The Never- Ending Greenness. We made Israel Bloom."- The book was written and illustrated by Neil Waldman. Published by Boyds Mills Press Inc. 1997. Originally published by: NY Morrow Junior Books 1997. Summary: "When his family comes to live in Israel after the end of World War II, a young boy begins planting and caring for trees, a practice that spreads across the whole Country." The author tells us the story of one Jewish family who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust and settled in Israel. After witnessing the terror of World War II and the bareness of his town of Vilna, a boy decides to plant trees to bring the spark of life to his new home. The amazing  Illustratrations add vividness to the story.  

2) "Has a Donkey Ever Brought you breakfast in bed"- This book was written by Pat Brannon and illustrated by Karen Deming. Published by Freedom of Speech Publishing Inc., Leawood KS 2012.  This author creates a funny world of "mighty" animals who can: "juggle lemons," "wear red go-go boots", or "tap dance all day long." It is a funny book with very simple illustrations that catch the eye. Even though it does not focus on one character, it is still a good story.  Your child will be laughing and pointing out the wacky animal events in the book.  If you want your child to have a good time get a copy.

3) "Dawn"- This book was written and illustrated by Uri Shulevitz. Published by Sunburst Books an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974. This is the second edition 1987. It is a great book to read to your children before they go to sleep. Simple words and simple illustrations make them live and feel in the moment. We usually do not take a moment to observe our own surroundings: the star shining in the sky above, the bird singing, or the blooming flower below our feet. This book will encourage your children to live in the moment. I highly recommend this book for everyone. It is amazing how one picture and a few words can tell a story. Go out there and get  your child a copy of this wonderful book.

Thank you everyone for following me on my blog. I will be celebrating two years in February, and I will try my best to make an update twice a month. Happy 2013 let your life shine life. Next time I will review Middle Grade books. 

rebeccamock:

Been working on personal projects lately! Here’s a digital painting I did today. :>

A self-portrait in windows and corners. Thinking about Tacita Dean’s piece called “More or Less”, which I saw last night at the New Museum.

Rebecca Mock!!! Three exclamation marks!

My eye wants to take in every wonderful thing in this quiet frozen moment in time: the textures, the soft changes in colour and tone, the map on the wall, that little photo, the bedspread, everything. I want to walk on that smooth polished floor, explore the rest of this little apartment, crane my neck into the next room so I can peek out that window. This is entirely due to Rebecca’s command of light and colour and composition.

A lot of artists think style is the most important thing to good art, but it isn’t. Style is a by-product, and tends to change multiple times over the course of your career. Style can be faked, copied, especially with the tech at our disposal today. 

But you can’t fake light and colour and composition. You either understand them or you don’t. They’re deliberate and planned, yet used poorly can result in pieces that are uptight and lifeless and cold. It can take years for most of us to get a decent grasp of them, even a lifetime. But they eventually become like tools in your kit, like your brushes and pens and paint. And when you know how to master them, you can create little worlds that seem so alive your audience will wish they could walk into them. 

By Anthony Scioli

Spring and hope are intertwined in the mind, body, and soul. In spring, nature conspires with biology and psychology to spark the basic needs that underlie hope: attachment, mastery, survival, and spirituality. It is true that hope doesn’t melt away in the summer; it isn’t rendered fallow in autumn nor does it perish in the deep freeze of winter. But none of these other seasons can match the bounty of hope that greets us in the spring. My reflections on hope and the spring season are cast in terms of metaphors.

Mind Metaphors

More than three decades ago, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson demonstrated how metaphors can reveal the inner structure of private feelings. For example, when we refer to “high hopes,” we are revealing something about the phenomenology of the hope experience, that it is “buoyant,” “uplifting,” even “energizing.”

Metaphors of Hope

My research as well as that of psychologists Shlomo Breznitz and James Averill has identified a number of hope metaphors. Below are the four most striking examples.

Light and Heat

Hope has been compared to light and heat. Karl Menninger called hope the “indispensable flame” of mental health. English writer Martin F. Tupper wrote, “though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart, speedily it glows again, warmed by the live embers of hope.”

Spring also brings added light and heat, sometimes so suddenly that we speak of a virtual “spring fever.” The first day of spring marks the vernal equinox, a balance of daylight and darkness. In the Northern Hemisphere this amounts to an average increase of three hours of light since the winter solstice, roughly a 20% gain. With increased light come a host of direct and indirect effects that improve mood and engender hope. Most directly, increased serotonin is produced. Serotonin is a major excitatory neurotransmitter in the nervous system, and the target of many antidepressant drugs. Among the indirect effects of spring on mood are increased exercise, and the physically related but psychologically distinct activities of gardening and farming.

Like spring, hope is also a 50-50 proposition. If our odds of achieving a particular outcome fall to less than fifty percent, we tend towards “despair.” If we are more than fifty percent certain of an outcome, we become “optimistic.” When psychologist James Averill and his colleagues surveyed individuals about their chances of realizing various hopes, the average response was fifty percent. For this reason, I believe that some kind of faith, not necessarily the religious type, but something essentially “spiritual,” must be present to ground our hopes.

Valley Green Bridge on the Wissahickon, Philadelphia, Pa. Detroit Publishing Company postcards. Source: NYPL.

A Bridge

Hope has been likened to a bridge that can actively transport the individual from darkness to light, from entrapment to liberation, from evil to salvation. 0 Comments on Why spring is the season of hope as of 1/1/1900