1. Free shipping

Shipping on my prints from INPRNT.com is free worldwide from now until Feb 1, 2015! I have a few of my favourite illustrations from Dream Boats available there as prints.

2. Backyard Books closes soon

And, the Backyard Books illustration exhibition closes at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum on February 15th. If you’ve never been, it’s worth a visit just for the giant whale skeleton that hangs from the ceiling and because you can walk all over some of the specimens (picture proof below). Also there are lots of drawers full of treasures. Well, at least the kind of things I think are treasures. Shells, insects, bones…

There is daily programming for children – story time (under the blue whale, of course), puppet shows etc, so it’s a great outing for kids.

The illustration I have on exhibit is a cover rough from my very first picture book, which is still in print and still plodding along…13 years later. The curators paired the painting with a cetacean skull.

Shipping on my prints from Inprnt.com is free worldwide from now until Dec 1st, 2014!

I have a piece of art in the upcoming Backyard Biodiversity Exhibit at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC (that’s a lot of Bs).

The exhibition features books and illustrations by CWILL BC writers and illustrators. My piece is the cover comp for my very first picture book, A Pod of Orcas. All the illustrations in that book were referenced from the shoreline around my home in Vancouver, and the author drew her inspiration from the shoreline around her home on Vancouver Island – so I think that qualifies as our backyards.

The opening event takes place on September 27th, from 12:00-3pm.

There will be readings and art activities.

There is a complete daily program list for the museum, here.

The Spectrum 21 awards were held back in May, with Gold going to Nicolas Delort’s illustration, The End of the Road, and Silver to Scott Gustafson’s Little Sambha and the Tiger with the Beautiful Purple Shoes with Crimson Soles, in the Book category. I was just really thrilled to have an illustration included as a finalist among so many fantastic works - such a nice surprise. (The winners in each category can be seen here)

I will have a few pieces published in the upcoming Spectrum 21 annual, including one featured on the table of contents page. Another nice surprise!

INPRNT.com has another shipping sale on right now, they are offering FREE (worthy of all-caps) worldwide shipping this weekend (weekend of June 13, 2014). If you are from anywhere outside the US, you’ll understand why this is such a big deal.

So I’ve added two new prints from Dream Boats, to my shop:

All prints are gallery-quality giclée art prints on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks. Each art print features a minimum one-inch border. Prints are unframed and unmatted.

I’ve seen the prints myself and the print quality is really excellent. Large prints arrive in a mailing tube, small prints are in a flat, cardboard envelope.
Large prints require some flattening when they are unpacked – carefully unroll them and put them under a few heavy books for a day or so.

Here are some photos of my test prints, packaging, as well as framing examples (all prints are unmatted and unframed) and while they are signed digitally, I do not hand sign prints sold through INPRNT as they do not pass through my hands on their way out:

A little bit of very late news here – some Dream Boats illustrations were included in the 2014 Applied Arts Photography and Illustration Awards annual in May, 2014. Six illustrations were included in the annual, and they are also on view on the Applied Arts website.

Also, Dream Boats was included in this very nice list on the Reading Rainbow blog: 15 First Picture-Book Gift Ideas for Children’s Book Week , written by Minh Le. (If you haven’t heard already, Reading Rainbow has a Kickstarter campaign on the go right now).

Reading Rainbow was a big thing on TV when I was a kid. But growing up in a TV-less house, it wasn’t a large part of my childhood (but books were, so it’s all good). However, the kids across the street had a TV so I did get tiny doses of it now and again, the result being that way back there in my brain is a little drawer containing the theme song, and hearing it now does stir up a tiny bit of nostalgia; suddenly I’m 7 again, right back there in that playroom littered with the neighbour-kids’ He-Man action figures, watching TV while eating raw hotdog wieners wrapped in kraft cheese slices.

INPRNT.com has a shipping sale on right now – 10$ worldwide until Wed, April 30th, which is a heck of a deal, to Canada anyway.

If there’s a print from Dream Boats you’re particularly interested in, email me at  pangolin::AT::kirstiwakelin::DOT::com before midnight PST on Monday, April 29th and I’ll put it up there with the other ones.

All prints are gallery-quality giclée art prints on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks. Each art print features a minimum one-inch border. Prints are unframed and unmatted.

I’ve seen the prints myself and the print quality is really excellent.

I’m going to cram a bunch of news into one blog post.

First, because it’s time sensitive:

Print Sale

Inprnt.com is having a sale, so that means 20% off my prints until Monday, March 31st ’13.  They’re available in 2 sizes, and this is a framed example of the smaller size. (Prints are sold unframed). Please note this is a signed example – as the Inprnt prints don’t pass through my hands, prints bought through them are unsigned.

Art at YVR

I have some paintings on display at YVR. If you’re travelling to Mexico, or Japan in the next short while, you might come across them. Very kind travelling friends sent me some photos recently. These ones are near gate D52 on the international side where Air Canada departs to Mexico, and are illustrations from Looking for Loons and A Pod of Orcas:

And these illustrations from Dream Boats were recently located near gate 71:

Illustration Awards

Work from Dream Boats made it into the May/June 2014 Applied Arts Photography & Illustration Awards issue.

Also, five illustrations from Dream Boats, will be included in Spectrum 21, and one of them nominated for an award in the Book category, which is all very exciting. But I’m just really, really thrilled to be listed in there with so many exceedingly talented illustrators. Also, really intimidated. Ok, mostly intimidated. But the most wonderful thing about it all, award nomination or no, is that Yuko Shimizu, an illustrator who I hold in extremely high regard and who’s work is technically, aesthetically and conceptually stunning, said something really nice about one of my pieces. When I saw this, I almost died.

INPRNT is having a print sale now until Sunday, Feb 9th 2014.

So these are now 20% off:

All prints are gallery-quality giclée art print on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks. Each art print features a minimum one-inch border. Prints are unframed and unmatted.

They are available in two sizes.

I have many reasons why I wish New York was closer, and most all of them are art related. Here’s one such example: The New York Public Library’s (free!) exhibition The ABC of it: Why Children’s Books Matter.

Alas, a New York trip is not in the cards for me any time soon, so I’ll have to content myself with the slideshow of photographs on the exhibit designers’ website (Pure+Applied), complete with a shot of a furry wall and Wild Thing doorway, and for the observant child, Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall. There is also an exhibition brochure available for download from the NYPL website (bottom of the page), complete with a cleverly designed page on banned books.

The exhibition runs until March 23, 2013.

more info here: NYPL exhibition press release

Mountains & Plains Winter Catalog.

Dream Boats is the featured book in this winter’s 300,000 copies of the Mountains and Plains Independent Book Sellers Association Winter catalog. It’s on the cover, and a few little vignettes made their way into the inside of the catalog as well.

Mountains & Plains is an almost 40 year old non-profit professional association of locally-owned bookstores, booksellers, and industry professionals. Wherever you are, please support your local, independent bookstore this holiday season. If you happen to be in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming, there is a list of store locations on the MPIBA website.

My favourite Vancouver bookstore is Kidsbooks (Kitsilano, South Surrey, and Edgemont Village, North Vancouver). Their staff is incredibly knowledgable, and the are wonderful advocates for local authors and illustrators, and for great books for kids (and teens)…and they even have a few for adults!

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Dream Boats is a 2014 Recommended Read.

Dream Boats made the 2014 Canadian Toy Testing Council’s list of recommended reads for the age group 5+.

Also, this is going on until the end of November: 

A Good Book Drive is an annual book drive to bring stories to a new generation of readers, and support kids in need of new books.

Running through the month of November, A Good Book Drive will be inspiring Vancouverites to purchase a new copy of their favorite kids’ book and deliver it to set locations throughout the city to be donated to this year’s book drive recipient.

- read more and find out how you can participate, on the A Good Book Drive website
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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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I recently commented on INPRINT’s costly international shipping prices ($35 to Canada!). The good news is they’re running a very short promo (it’ll be all over on November 10th) for $10 international shipping!

For the duration of the shipping deal I’m offering a smaller print size option. Please note the print size reflects the size of the paper not the image size (there is a minimum 1″ border on all sides, and my artwork is thin landscape, so an 11″x24″ paper size = 9″x22″ image and 12″x18″ paper size = aprox 6.56″x16″ image

Prior to uploading some artwork of my own, I ordered a print by another artist who’s work I’m fond of, to check the print quality (conclusion: it’s good).
(hint: prints make great gifts…and since we’re already into November and shipping takes a couple of weeks, it’s good to plan ahead)

I ordered a few of my prints from INPRNT.com to see what the quality is like. The print and paper quality is great, I’m really happy with it, and the colour is exactly as I was hoping for. It actually exactly matches earlier prints I had done through Opus.
The only thing that I’m not keen on is the shipping price from the U.S to Canada. It’s reasonable within the States, but to Canada I think it’s way too much ($35!). For that reason, I’d love to find out if there was a good print on demand company in Canada as an alternative. If anyone knows of any please drop me an email or leave a comment.

For now, I’ve chosen to offer the prints at sizes that are as close to the original size. As a result of the size, they come in a mailing tube:

Inside the tube, the prints are wrapped in glassine paper:

Because the paper is thick, they required a bit of flattening:

Today, I dropped off a few packages of artwork at the Vancouver International Airport where it’ll be on display in one of the terminals for the next few months to a year, alongside the works of a few other Vancouver children’s book artists.

Included are paintings from Looking for Loons and A Pod of Orcas, as well as drawings and a final print from Dream Boats.

Here’s a little peek at some of what will be on view:

On the list!

Dream Boats made the Canadian Children’s Book Centre Best Books for Fall 2013 list (news and accompanying photo via my publisher).

Also, a copy of the book made it all the way to Japan, where it got this very nice review.
For a lot more book reviews (fiction and non-fiction), visit the Perogies & Gyoza website.

Aaaand…Dream Boats was also nominated for a Cybils. Nice!

And finally, Harper Collins is putting on a contest to illustrate Dennis Lee’s title poem of Alligator Pie. It’s Alligator Pie’s 40th anniversary. Not sure how I feel about that; I love the poem, I love the book, but I also really love Frank Newfeld’s illustrations and they were a source of endless delight to me when I was a kid. When I think of Alligator Pie, I can’t, nor do I want, to separate the words from the drawings. They are illustrations from another time – in a good way. As is the text.

On a related note, that wikipedia page on Frank Newfeld is sorely in need of some more content, and sadly, many of the out-links are broken. So in lieu of finding some images online, pick up a copy of Alligator Pie in your local children’s book store (I was pleased to see that it’s in print!). Or maybe have a helping of Garbage Delight. Or dig a little deeper and discover other book Frank Newfeld designed, illustrated, or wrote.

If you do want a little more information on Frank Newfeld, there is a write-up on him for a past GDC BC/Alcuin Society/CDOT/Canada Council/SFU event with a bit more info. I feel fortunate to have been able to attend this, especially given the great memories I have of the time I spent with his illustrations as a kid.

There are also some photographs from the event, including some photos of his artwork. Beautiful, beautiful work.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Featured Reader Art & Event Reminder.

This fantastic dream vessel, rendered in marker and ballpoint pen, is courtesy of 7-year-old avid reader, Ella. Thank you very much, Ella!

Also, a quick reminder that I’ll be at Village Books in Bellingham on October 5, 11am for an illustrator Q&A, beginning with a short talk on illustration. Not sure yet what I’ll talk about yet – maybe about influences and inspiration, style (or lack of), or that I learned the most important thing about creating art, not from art school, but from my grandmother when I was 5 years old. Or maybe why I chose to illustrate this book the way I did, and the challenges I encountered along the way… Bring your questions!

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Cover Out in Portland

I’m just back from a fantastic, restful camping trip on the beautiful Oregon Coast (see photo above), ending  with a 2 night Portland stop-over (in a hotel – which, in my opinion, is the best way to end a camping trip).

While we managed to squeeze the camping into the dry days, our city visit was a little wet. One day, we ducked into Powell’s Books to avoid a downpour and I discovered something familiar in the children’s section:

I also found these and the illustrations were just so beautiful that I couldn’t very well leave them behind…

Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, written by Joyce Sidman, is Illustrated by Rick Allen in many-layered lino prints, and is rich in colour and texture. The night scenes are vibrant and lively, and cheerfully coloured. A Monster Calls, written Patrick Ness, illustrated by Jim Kay, is equally exciting for its lack of colour and wonderful deep, dark spookiness;  it is the kind of book that I was thrilled to read as a 12-year old.

Just look at this great composition and this lovely figure, so beautifully drawn.

A Monster Calls also has the added bonus of being nicely designed, and does a fine job tying in a lot of great texture-rich sketchy vignettes and scuff marks.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Upcoming Illustrator Visit at Village Books

I’ll be at the lovely Village Books in Bellingham on October 5, 11am for an illustrator Q&A. Curious about the illustrations in Dream Boats? Curious about my book illustration process? Come on by and ask me some questions. (Or if you just want a book signed, I can do that too): 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, WA.
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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Following some queries as to if I’d sell prints of some of my illustrations, I’m giving INPRINT.com a try. The following illustrations are now available as gallery-quality giclée prints on 100% cotton rag archival paper, printed with archival inks.

Time Escapes, from Catching Time | 22×10 inches

Lilies & Koi, from Dream Boats |  22×9 inches

Starfishing, from Dream Boats |  22×9 inches

Dream Boats is on shelves now

So Dream Boats has now arrived in stores in both Canada and the U.S, and has had some very nice write ups  from booksellers, which is pretty thrilling, like this one from Brookline Booksmith in Massachusetts :

Also, Dream Boats is featured in the Winter 2013 Mountains and Plains Independent Book Sellers Association catalog, which is super cool! So if you’re looking for an independent bookstore in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming, here is a very handy list.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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We’ve launched!

Wow! Thank you to everyone one who came to the launch last night, asked me great questions, and helped buy out the Lyceum’s entire stock of Dream Boats books. And thank you to everyone one who is patently waiting for the book you ordered to get to you – Dan and I will sign them as soon as we get them! And thank you to all the little kids who came, and folded paper boats, and helped launch the book with us. 

And also, a big thank you to the Lyceum staff who put on yet another wonderful event complete with food, drink, and a paper boat folding station! We are fortunate to have such a champion of children’s literature in our neighbourhood.

And also to my publisher, Simply Read Books, who let me get creative with this book.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Water, it’s a tricky thing.

excerpt from Dream Boats:

This recent post on the blog Illustration Art not only includes example of how some of my favourite illustrators and painters handled the tricky subject of water, but it is also a rather timely post. I’ve been thinking about water and how to paint it for a really long time, having spent most of 4 years trying to figure out the best ways to render it in the illustrations of Dream Boats. It’s a central theme in the book and main element within the text.

I made a decision really early in the concepts not to ground the book in the terrestrial realm. It is a book about dreams, after all; anything can happen. So I took the characters up into space, I floated them on muddy rivers, on canals that changed between pages from window glass-clear to looking glass-reflective, through misty trees, and roiling oceans, and in the sky above oxbow rivers, frozen seas, and the deltas where the rivers of Iceland meet the sea.

Wherever the boats went, it was important that water was present, somehow. Up in space, water is represented in the blue surface of the earth, in the flow of the composition, and in the creatures that drift among the masts and oars of the boats; moon jellies, lookdown fish (chosen for their flowing fins and similarity to the Atlantic moonfish), radiolarian (rendered in gigantic proportion). The result is the boats might just as easily be thought to be drifting beneath the surface of the oceans, as above it. And so water becomes portal to other worlds, as much as a conduit to adventure.

Practically, the representation of water became tricky when the ocean, seen from above on one page, became the sky on the next page, and then a storm tossed sea transformed into a snow covered landscape.

Continuity is exceedingly important in a picture book. But how do you deal with that when your character can at once rise up in all manner of rolling forms, break itself into white foam, and burn the colour of a blazing sunset, at at another be as clear and flat as a pane of glass, or turn the colour of a blue summer sky?

Inspiration was drawn equally from Hiroshige’s flat, graphic representation of bodies of water, the natural bloom of ink on a wet piece of watercolour paper, and the photographs I’ve taken of rivers and oceans from a plane over Iceland, the Arctic, and Northern B.C.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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(click to see bigger)

Book launch reminder – join us tomorrow night!

Dan and I are dusting off our launch hats; he’s readying his reading voice, and we’re both quelling jitters for our Dream Boats launch tomorrow night.
There will be some paper boats, refreshments, a Q&A, and reading. And Dan and I with our autograph pens. However, Dan has been clear there will be no pony rides, reindeer, bears, or llamas, so do not expect to find any of those sharing the stage with us tomorrow night, except for on the pages of our very-ready-to-launch book. Probably for the best – I know for a fact Christianne likes to keep the Lyceum floor clean, and reindeer are hard to come by at this time of year.

It all goes down on Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 7:00 pm at Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art, 3696 West 8th Avenue, Vancouver. (Corner of Alma & 8th)

A bit more of a look at what’s between the covers…

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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On the Cover

Dream Boats deliberately does not have a dust jacket. It seems opinions are very split on book jackets. Some people love them, some people remove them immediately, shove them in a drawer, recycle them, or pin them up as wall art. At the beginning of the book process I had a nebulous idea of the cover but I had a definite idea about a jacket; I didn’t want one. A big part of my reasoning was my desire to cut down on excessive paper use, especially as this book is longer than the average picture book at 40 pages, the other was that a jacket didn’t fit with the idea I had for the feel of the book.

Covers are an incredibly challenging part of the book. Sometimes a cover uses an interior illustration, and often because a cover image is required really early in the process for marketing purposes, the cover is created first, before all the other artwork – which usually means before the illustrator has had time to really spend time figuring out the the illustrations as a whole, and that can result in cover art that looks stylistically different from the interior artwork. This cover took some figuring out; it wasn’t going to work to use an interior illustration, because the book is full of different stories, about different individuals. Additionally, I knew I couldn’t use one character from within the book, because the book is full of a variety of characters and I also wanted to keep the narrative voice that flows through the book as open as possible to allow a child-listener or reader to inhabit the story as that character. I toyed with the idea of showing a number of boats, with the children left somewhat indistinct, but that didn’t feel right either (plus marketing deemed it too scary [as an aside - I would truly love to illustrate a scary book]).

Early (rejected) cover illustration sketch

Early (rejected) cover illustration mockup 

Partway through the illustration process I decided to include a folded boat that would appear on all the narrated pages (more on the narrated pages vs story pages in a later post). In the dreamscapes this boat it is brightly collaged. I decided this was the object-character that needed to be on the cover, and by including a fanciful reflection (or an upside-down glimpse into another world), I could hint at the dreams and magic inside. Additionally, water is an important element within the text, it appears as raindrops, oceans, and rivers, so it also needed to be prominently featured on the cover.

The interior illustrations start off quite quietly and build to depictions of densely detailed dreams and adventure, so I felt that a quieter, more contemplative cover was required. I didn’t want to give it all away on the cover.

Finally, I designed a varnish for the ‘reflected’ area, to further play up the feeling of water, reflections, or alternative veils of reality.

This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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