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Muhlenberg County High School Visual Arts

Muhlenberg County High School Visual Arts

Muhlenberg County High School Visual Arts

Muhlenberg County High School Visual Arts

Muhlenberg County High School Visual Arts

All has been quiet the last little while but progress is being made and the bilinguals are coming! As well as coloring book II. Progress on Bilinguals Our focus has been on the Maori-English bilingual, which needs some small textual adjustments, prior to going forward to publication. Update: The Maori-English Bilingual is in its final layout/formatting stage before printing and publishing

What is the Katherine Paterson Prize for YA and Children’s Writing?

LATEST NEWS

The North Carolina Press Foundation is offering four of Artie’s serial stories to Newspapers in Education (NIE) newspapers across the United States. This year’s theme is Dig into Reading. In addition to the NIE, the foundation will also be offering Artie’s work to libraries and other newspapers throughout the United States. To read the stories please click on the NC Press Foundation link listed above.

Two of Artie’s children’s books will be featured on Ameba TV beginning this summer. Based in Canada, Ameba TV is presently streamed worldwide in million of homes.

Ameba TV’s rich, diverse content library delivers thousands of hours of educational, preschool, musical, and multilingual programming to children ages 2 to 12. The popular children’s streaming TV service features award-winning shows, like WordWorld, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That, BusyTown Mysteries, and Ruby Skye PI.

More to come!

View from a Zoo – Bored with her life, a housecat seeks out adventure in this new fully illustrated picture book coming in the summer of 2013. Written by Artie, the book is being illustrated by the incredibly talented Indian artist Sunayana Nair Kanjilal. More to come as the book’s release date gets closer….

Use of any of the content on this website without permission is prohibited by federal law

Take a quiz on the middle grade novel Patalosh: The Time Travelers.

Lots of news and more art!  Josh and I found out that we are having a baby boy just last week, I started a new book project with a new company (that for the time being is still top secret- although I was given the ok to post an occasional work-in-progress image so long as I blur any text and don't give too much away), and I still have final images to create for Fadenrot!

Phew!

I wish so much that I could post the entire PDF of my storyboards for this story as it is very funny... and I'm pretty happy with the images.  I tried to be a lot more loose and a little more "cartoony" with the figures... I think it just fit the story more.  So far, this has been a fun project!

I'm also well into the second trimester of the pregnancy and the morning sickness is truly behind me.  That was SO hard.  Four months of being sick as a dog, and sometimes for the entire day (!!), and just in a total haze... I missed feeling normal... but as I said, I am back, and working hard!  :)  This has been already pretty crazy but at the same time, I'm sure things have yet to change... hee hee... lucky for me I have plenty of girl friends who have just gone through or are going through this at the same time.  I'm sure having a little guy to draw will be very fun, too, and hopefully, we can draw together in the future, my little bean and I... ;)

Fadenrot is always going to be my favorite client... I describe the way we work together to other artists and it is always the "ideal" situation/relationship... I get a theme (and these themes are always wonderfully inspiring and something I would LOVE to draw) and then I sketch like crazy these things that come to mind and my client picks and chooses what she likes... I do some revising, some fine-tuning, and then there it is!!  A new image for her to print and show the world!  It's the best... especially because sketching always inspires some really great ideas for me... :)  It's also just kind of cool to see your art on clothing!  :)

I'm just feeling very grateful, I suppose, and had to share... :)
So here are images to reflect what I am writing here...

First, our Benjamin Lee Yoshimitsu at 5 months:

I recently took a full-time position as a proofreader for an accounting firm. Proofreading financial reports differs from the type of proofreading I’ve done in the past, but I’m learning a lot and enjoying it.

Over my writing career, I’ve discovered the importance of remaining flexible to making a living from writing. The writer who has diversified talents is better able to weather changes in the economy and workforce than a one-skill wonder.

Some writers choose to work a full-time job outside the writing field for better financial security. They may find a nonwriting job drains their creativity less than a writing job does, giving them the energy and enthusiasm to write in their spare time.

Proofreading work is a good fit for me because it draws little from my creativity but keeps me current and my writing mechanics sharp.

I feel like a curmudgeon for saying this, but what is happening with girl's toys and play costumes? Everything is pink, glitter and bling. I understand many little girls of a certain age love the color pink and go through a princess stage. But it looks to me like a rather disproportionate number of girls toys are promoting limited ideals for girls: be a princess, rock star or a celebrity. 

Where is this all going? I don't know. It would take up too much time and space on this post and I'm sure you don't want to read it. But I do like books like this one illustrated by Jack Keats - How Animals Sleep. It's interesting and real life. There. Off my podium. Nuff said.

I feel like a curmudgeon for saying this, but what is happening with girl's toys and play costumes? Everything is pink, glitter and bling. I understand many little girls of a certain age love the color pink and go through a princess stage. But it looks to me like a rather disproportionate number of girls toys are promoting limited ideals for girls: be a princess, rock star or a celebrity. 

Where is this all going? I don't know. It would take up too much time and space on this post and I'm sure you don't want to read it. But I do like books like this one illustrated by Jack Keats - How Animals Sleep. It's interesting and real life. There. Off my podium. Nuff said.

Yes, Moleskine, the European makers of those expensive little pocket sketchbooks and other diaries has gone public. Read about it in the Wall Street Journal.

“Mom, you need to talk to Noah and tell him I need more cinnamon on my morning toast.” I raised my eyebrows at the first grader. “I doubt you need more. You already… Read More →

“Mom, you need to talk to Noah and tell him I need more cinnamon on my morning toast.” I raised my eyebrows at the first grader. “I doubt you need more. You already… Read More →

Often when I'm working, I listen to This American Life. This week's show turned out to be a foreshadowing of today's huge tornado in Oklahoma. This is SO worth a listen, please listen. 

Life is different when you have a child. It means finally growing up and taking responsibility for someone else. Someone who needs love, affection and to be shown the right developmental path. You want a well rounded, caring, thoughtful, enquiring, … Continue reading →

My May Days project involves coming up with an outline for a book I've been thinking about writing for, maybe, ten years. I got started with research and a few notes twice. But with my last few writing projects, I've been trying to get away from the organic writer thing and do more pre-writing plotting. So that's what's happening this month.

Sometime before I wrote my last, for the time being, unpublished book, I invested in a copy of Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. As a result, I've been very interested in plots starting with a disturbance to the main character's world. I really don't care for the give characters a problem thing that I've heard so much about, but a disturbance to their world makes all the sense in the world to me. In fact, that's how almost all my books began before I'd even heard anything about disturbing a world. Disturbing people may come naturally to me.

Needless to say, that's how my May Days project is starting, with a disturbance.

Looking at my Plot & Structure notes this morning, I saw that Bell talks about plot patterns. I have three significant characters, and I'm going to try to give each one of them a different pattern, which is more or less their goal. For instance, one character's plot pattern/goal is revenge, the second's is a quest, and the third's is what Bell calls "one apart"--a loner who is forced to act.

Now, sometime in the past I found the following story structure at a website called Storyfix:

Think in terms of four-parts to your plot.



Part 1. Set up.

Part 2. Collecting information. Either the author, or the protagonist  Some people will talk about complications at this point in a story, but as an organic writer, that leaves me wondering “What complications? Where am I supposed to get those?” Sending my character out to collect more information about what’s happening to her or her world, makes more sense to me and it’s phrased dynamically.


Mid-point—Plot Twist or maybe where Protagonist Changes

Part 3 Protagonist uses information

Part 4 Ending

I like that structure because it is so simple. And it tells me what to do. And it is a structure, not a formula, like the give-your-character-something-to-want-and-then-keep-it-from-her thing that I have also heard a lot of in the past.

So this is what I'm working on this month with my May Days project.

This is what appeared in my DePauw University email inbox this morning, from our university president, Brian Casey: