Yippie!!!

I won a Uprinting.com canvas print from Chicken Girl Design!

How awesome is that?

I made a couple fonts. It was so much fun!

My daughter named them "Buggy" and "Mister Nibbles" so I put a couple lil'bugs in them. Mister Nibbles is my favorite. I started another one today. Can't wait to use them!

We had a terrific Christmas and I hope all of you are enjoying your holidays as well!

...thinking about this post today while I paint.

Our critique group put on a panel discussion Thursday night. It seemed to go well.

We all approached the same text and presented our process. The text we used was a poem called Picture Books in Winter by Robert Louis Stevenson. Here is one of my sketches on the way to a mock cover.

I have read other blogger mentioning Delphine Durand lately. We have been enjoying her quirky work over the last several months. I noticed her work when we were in Italy last year at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. A lot of what we saw was wildly different from what I am used to seeing in the children's market and I loved so much of it. However, I felt a lot would be scary or maybe too abstract for our book market. A few stood out, Delphine's work included.

I was looking around the internet about this years' Surtex show in NYC. This post interested me because of her insight regarding distinctive style:

**As an artist it's imperative that you create work in a style that becomes you.**

If you do artwork that's all over the place and that doesn't have a look that can be traced to you, you can forget ever finding steady work. For this year's show I saw my art being divided in three ways that really stood out to me...

I designed three separate business cards so that people could take whichever card was going to remind them of what they were interested in my art for. It turns out that this idea was pure gold and I got a huge response from people who would methodically look through the three cards and then take one for their ever growing packet of artist materials.

NYC was crazy. I woke up at 3am Monday morning. My dad dropped me off at the airport at 4:45am. Donna F and I met up on the plane. We managed the mass transit system and made it to our destination in Manhattan on time. But getting back turned out to be an unwelcomed adventure. It was rush hour, and therefore crowed. Among other missteps, we took a train that didn't stop at our transfer point and we went past it...Meanwhile our cushion for catching the flight home was closing. We made it seconds too late for the subway transfer and had to wait for the next train. I was concerned that we may not make it to the airport before take-off. So when we did finally get to the airport, we ran to the gate...Only to find out that our flight was delayed almost 5 hours due to weather! I just wanted to be home. We finally landed in Rochester after 2am. (My mom picked me up. I had left my car at their house, so I drove myself home the rest of the way.) I got into bed at 3:01am...24 hours after getting up. Then I got up at 5:50am to get ready to go into school for the day Tuesday. I took and hour nap before I had to pick up Ryan from track practice, then I had to go shopping and help him get ready fro his Boston trip. So it took until Thursday for me to return to even keel!

Having my work critiqued by Mela B felt like taking several rounds in place of a punching bag. A rapid succession of good fists to the stomach. Her feedback was specific and I left better for it. I can now digest and hopefully use it to produce better work!

• Nail down your style. Don't show too many mediums...confuses who you are to a prospective art buyer.
• Work on narrative presentation. Each should tell a story. Show a series of three scenes (story progression) creatively. Do a sketch dummy to show you understand story progression.
• Foreground, middle ground, background! "The image should draw a child in and back out." (Too much character/background, character/background)
• Keep the "organic" quality in your work. This piece of advice confuses me and I wish now that I had clarification. She pointed out the two pieces, in her opinion, that were the most successful and talked about the organic quality(mentioning elbows in particular). By then my head was spinning as I was trying to catalog and retain all this feedback!