Desperately Seeking Tim Burton

Dear Mr. Burton,

I've found myself in a desperate rut, the likes of which you've managed to retrieve me from in the past, and I'm hoping you will be available again sometime soon.

January a year ago, I made a trek to the Museum of Modern Art, specifically to view your work on display there. I bought a membership just so I wouldn't have to stand in line with all the other saps who had to wait to get in.

The rooms that housed your exhibit were terribly crowded; I'm sure we were well beyond the building's fire code. Sardines, as it were. But I managed to see everything, just to make sure I didn't miss anything that might later turn out to be something I would have liked to have seen.

After I squeezed my way through all the rooms I took a breather. I bought some stuff. I ate some stuff and, in spite of the sardine thing, I decided I needed to get myself back in the middle of that exhibit.

So I did.

This time I knew exactly what I needed to see again, so I jumped out of the line that snaked around the rooms and headed straight for the drawings.

The drawings, as you know, were watercolor outlined in pen, so there was really nothing out of the ordinary there. Using the media in that way was nothing new, and had never been a source of inspiration for me. So that couldn't really have been the attraction.

Why was I still there? Why couldn't I take my eyes off these images? Why were these images so much better than what I conjured in my own sketchbooks?

I think what sucked me back into those rooms and set my sparks flying was that unrestrained childlike imagination. How does an artist allow himself to let everything fly out the window like that? The caricatures were well beyond caricatures. Arms and legs and tails and horns and whatever other body parts that could conceivably be conceived as a body part were attached to shapes that weren't really bodies until simulated body parts had been attached.

But you knew that.

Stripes and checkerboards and spirals and dipping horizons added to my acute sense of instability, and all I could do was stand in front of them and try to soak in as much as my little brain could soak in, in the hopes that some day that freedom would spew out in my own work.

On the train ride home I drew. Over the next few months I drew some more. I was inspired and ready to take on my own sketchbook demons and wrestle them into something I could proudly show the world.

Things seep away over time, however. It's been another year, and I seem to have lost that thing. That permission you had given me to create outrageousnous. Those weird images that had been crisscrossing around in my head. And, ultimately, the hope that somewhere down the line it would all be worth it.

Dear Tim (do you mind if I call you Tim?), please send me a sign. Something. Anything. Something to get me back on track. Something to help me find my monsters. I'm afraid right now they're lost, and I'm also afraid they're scared. And hungry. I know I am. I desperately need to bring them home.

Please help me bring them back home.

Signed,

Nora

P.S. Thank you kindly for allowing my family to give me your art book last Christmas, and I'm eagerly awaiting your and Danny's CD box set, as my Alice in Wonderland soundtrack is quite possibly wearing thin.

Frankenstein Hot Cocoa Steampunk Sketcheroo

I'll be participating in the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrator's mixed drink directory later this year, and I wanted to mash Frankenstein up with a little steampunk. My recipe will be for hot cocoa, and this is the sketch I came up with. Thanks once again to Harpers Ferry, WV, and their great collection of stone buildings and textures that have yet to let me down.

"The Lost Thing" or "How Shaun Tan Helped Me Find What Went Missing"

This is going to take a while, so I apologize right up front, and I thank you for seeing it through to the end, if you do. Let's start by stating the instigation for this post:

Shaun Tan is changing my career.

There. I said it, now it's out there, and now I have to find the nerve to follow it through.

This all started the day I bought Shaun Tan's book Tales from Outer Suburbia last year, mostly for the illustrations (as usual), but also because I'd been working on a book of short stories of my own, and I wanted to see how somebody else tackled that kind of project.

Having Suburbia and a library borrow of his The Arrival as my only Shaun Tan interactions, I dragged family to see the Oscar-Nominated Animation Shorts at a local movie theater last month. The Lost Thing was one of the nominees (and eventual Oscar winner) and was based on Shaun's Australian-released children's* book of the same name. Shaun also worked for years on the movie.

*The word "children's" is a little dodgy here. The book will be forced into the children's section of bookstores because, cleary, no adult would be caught with a book filled with *gasp* pictures.

I bought the 15-minute short from iTunes within the week (sorry, no direct URL to the movie on iTunes). I pre-ordered his book Lost and Found which was released a few days later and included three of his early picture books, one of which was The Lost Thing.

I tweeted about our movie night. I tweeted about the Oscar win. I tweeted about iTunes. I tweeted about Lost and Found. Suffice it to say, the movie lingered in my little brain longer than expected. Evidently, something had happened over those few days that was making that little brain do some thinking.

I thought about my own career, and I thought about where I might have lost it.

My own Lost Thing.

I checked my checklist:

• I work hard (kid's illustrations, The Rots, one of many books in the works).
• I brand each aspect of my professional life as professionally as I can (see the sites above and below).
• I promote myself (this blog, The Rots' blog, my book blog, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I send out promotional postcards religiously).
• I promote others.
• I try to be a good little small-business marketer (see everything above).
• I follow advice when it comes from multiple, knowledgable sources (art directors, editors and agents).
• I make changes that those sources seem to think are necessary.

I've heard a lot of advice through the years about what editors and art directors are looking for in an illustrator. I'm a member of SCBWI, and I attend the local conferences. Before I go on, I just want to say that I know these are only opinions and guidelines, and if my work is good, it's just a matter of finding the right editor/art director/project that will take me on, regardless of whether the work followed the advice given. I know that. I understand that. But when the work isn't coming in and the same advice is (again and again), it may be time to think about making some changes.

This is Stanley. He is the image I used on the first postcard I sent out with the style I could finally call mine. My initial portfolio and book submissions were similar.

I was told by two editors that they were concerned my characters weren't cute enough.

I was told by a fellow illustrator that I needed to think along the lines of three-year-olds and clowns. "And smiles," he said. "Not creepy."

I was told by an art director that she could only use my work for scary stories.

I was told by another art director that he couldn't use my work, but to send him updates anyway because "you never know." (That publishing company released a book of poetry less than two years later using an illustrator who's work was very similar to mine, but who's pedigree included working for Disney.)

At a conference in NYC during an open question session with a couple of art directors, one answered the question, "What are you looking for in a submission?" with:

"Don't send me people with googly eyes, big heads, small bodies and little skinny legs."

Our portfolios had been open for preview earlier in the day. You can't make this stuff up.

I made the changes. I concentrated on cuter. My heads got smaller, along with my eyes, which also evened themselves out and eventually constricted to pupils. I drew clowns. I made new samples and avoided the scary. My people were smiling. I kept up with the promotions. I sent new samples every three months. I tried to keep my attitude positive.

And yet.

Why was I not getting the work?

I posed the question to an editor. "I love it!" she said. "But this would be a hard sell."

I posed the question to an agent. "It's the economy," he said. "Just keep doing what you're doing."

I posed the question to an art director that same day. "It's the economy," she repeated. "You're doing everything right."

I rewrote some of my "adult" short stories to make them more "accessible" to a younger audience, based on things I had read and heard at conferences:

• I made my kids the protagonists.
• I made my kids solve the problems.
• I kept my picture book submissions to 32 printer-friendly pages.
• I consciously made an effort to create unusual perspectives and action in my illustration samples.
• I added pages to my Web site to show I knew how to develop a character and create sequential imagery.

But more than anything I took the edge off my illustrations.

And yet.

Enter Shaun Tan.

Lost and Found is just beautiful. It breaks the rules because it can. It breaks the rules because Hatchett Australia and Arthur A. Levine gave Shaun Tan a chance to break the rules. And Shaun Tan got the chance to break the rules because he created beautiful images and wrote from the heart.

I know. There's that other piece of advice that gets thrown around a lot. But what if beautiful images and writing from the heart stomps all over the other rules?

The Lost Thing actually shows men smoking! Not once, but three times! Smoking! The horror!

The first of the three stories is resolved by a tree, and the third story isn't really resolved at all. But the kids! Aren't the kids supposed to be who make everything alright?

All three stories in the Lost and Found collection have themes that would surely be considered adult-oriented. Right? Maybe older kids, but certainly not those three-year-old clown lovers. (How many kids would really understand the sign, "State-sponsored thought for the day: LET THE MARKET DECIDE"?)

And those illustrations? Where are all the action shots? Where are all the in-your-face pay-attention-to-me page compositions? What's to keep the attention of these attention-deficit children?

That's when I took a look back over the last few years to see what happened. When did I change? When did I stop illustrating for me?

I took a(nother) long, deep breath and asked, "Where did I go?"

I had lost my Me somewhere.

My funny. My style. My twisted sense of humor. The Me that made my illustrations mine. My ideas had been squashed by 32 pages of cute. Of action. Of advice. Of opinions.

Shaun Tan's advice to illustrators:

"Think about the things in yourself that are different to everybody else. And don’t think of those as a disability or something negative, but think of it as a positive attribute. Whatever it is that makes you unique, that’s what people are interested in." 

Really? I so need this to be true.

I want to make a beautiful book that happens to be loaded with illustrations. A book with pictures. Why are picture books only geared toward kids? I buy kid's books all the time. For me. I buy them for the pictures. My collection of picture books are alphabetized by illustrator.

I want to make the beautiful books I see in my head, the ones that most publishers won't touch, the ones that may or may not contain kids, where the kid may or may not be the protagonist, that may or may not be scary, that may or may not have an adult sneaking a smoke in somewhere. The ones that may or may not depict clowns as the creepy nightmares they really are.

So I guess at this point I'm on my own.

I'm going to revisit some old picture books I had given up on. They had been poked and prodded and reinvented to the point I didn't recognize them anymore. My original vision had been lost in my attempt to make them conform.

I'm going to continue with my Hairy Eyeballs project, but I'm not going to hold my breath for a publisher. I've submitted the book to an editor I met at a conference who definitely seems the type who would go for this sort of twisted idea of a thing, but I'll completely understand when she tells me she isn't interested. After the book is rejected in a few months, it will be my baby again, and I've no plans on submitting it elsewhere. I know people who will help me with the editing. I've already designed the book. I have a following of close to 3,800 people on Facebook as of this writing who think my twisted little characters really are cute (their word, not mine). But more than anything, I don't feel the need to be accepted by the mainstream publishing world anymore.

I'm ready to make the books I've always wanted to make.

It's time.

So it's very likely at this point I'm the only one still here. But that doesn't really matter right now, because this post was just for me.

And now, thanks to a lost thing, my creativity is again, too.

Robot guitar man

 

This was a drawing I made at work one day, and I wasn't really sure what to do with him at the time. Since then, I figured out a way to squeeze him into the book I've been working on, and here he is, "spruced up" a bit to fit with the other stories in the book.

Spinach has as much iron as watermelon

Here's why you have to actually proofread (and don't assume spell check is good enough).

Whoever wrote out the results of an 1870 (or 1890, depending on where you get your information) German study misplaced a decimal point one spot to the right of where it was supposed to be and gave spinach ten times the iron than it actually had. It was written out by hand, so we can almost forgive the guy.

The bad part? It wasn't until 1937 that some other German dudes discovered the typo and fixed it. But even then, it wasn't really pointed out to the public until the British Medical Journal republished the study in 1981. Too late. Popeye debuted as a supporting character in Thimble Theatre in 1929, and has been hyping cans of spinach since. And actually, spinach eating jumped 33% between 1931 and 1936 in the U.S. which supposedly saved the spinach industry.

So all the kids who grew up being forced to eat their spinach can thank a cartoon and a typo.

Zombie tooth

I've had root canals before, so this one wasn't bothering me all that much. I never really understood what all the bad press was about. Yeah, it was inconvenient, expensive, took a long time (try holding your mouth open wide for an hour and see what I mean) and took more than one trip, but I never really experienced major pain or side effects or anything. I was a little cranky going in because all of the above, but still.

This time I had to go to a root canal specialist. I won't get into the whole story (short version: the dentist before mine didn't finish the original root canal in this tooth properly), but there was some curving going around in there, and my dentist shooed me on.

Let me back up and say that the only reason I found out that the first root canal wasn't finished properly was because the crown that other dentist had attached (also improperly) to the tooth came off.

Let me back up a wee bit further and say I had just finished a month-long root canal on a different tooth four days before said crown came off.

So I started out not a happy camper.

Anyway, my nubbins of a tooth looked zombie-ish to me. I even thought I could hear it's little voice yelling, "brrrraaaaaaaaiiiiiinnnnns," but I wasn't certain about that. I won't scare you with an actual photo (pretty gross in there), but I will show you the x-ray. I think you can figure out which one's the zombie.

And all that other work? Yeah, that's from grinding my teeth at night. But I digress...

By the way, it took a full week to recover from the first part of this root canal. First came the pain, which bypassed anything my pain prescription could handle. Then came the swelling. I already have a problem with the roots of my teeth pushing up into my sinuses on a normal day, but the swelling caused major allergy-type symptoms (obnoxious nose-running, sneezing, itching, you get the idea). Not only that, even when I wasn't trying to eat I kept biting the inside of my cheek.

I go back to get the root canal finished on Thursday. Then I get to go to a periodontist to get part of my gums removed. Then I get to go back to my regular dentist for the final tooth restoration.

Oh, and I'm paying for this without insurance on an illustrator's bank account.

I think this is what they mean by "root canal."

Other than that, everything's going just fine.

O.K. The snow can be done now

I'm finished with winter.

We've endured snow on the ground almost every day since the beginning of December, and the time I've set aside for winter months has officially run its course. The sunny days and beautiful blue skies will only dupe the senses for so long when the temperature refuses to go high enough to melt the white stuff.

I'm tired of running on a treadmill with my iPod staring at boxes in the basement.

I want to ride my bicycle. On a trail. Outside. In shorts.

I want to walk in the woods.

I want to eat ice cream.

Blogging combo

I've been trying to keep way, way too many blogs in the air at the same time, and for all the right reasons I'm in the process of combining as many as I can. So my graphic design/editorial illustration/fine art blog posts from a different blog are now integrated into and between the posts in this blog.

And you probably didn't even notice.

I hope things don't get too mushy, but if you're feeling they are, please let me know. I'm going to keep the old graphic design blog in place while I wait on feedback, so I can always separate everything again in the future.

In the meantime, I'm trying to figure out what to call the blog and how to integrate my graphic design/fine art brands (somewhat serious) with my kid's illustration brand (not so much), which isn't the easiest thing to do. I might play around with a few ideas before something actually feels right for me so, you know, comments are always helpful.

Small violinist, big room

Meet Nick.

He's trying to be my next postcard image. We'll see how that goes after he gets some color.

P.S. The horn player's name is Clarice.

The gift of a Web site: Priceless

So for Christmas, the present I gave that made the biggest splash was a Web site I built for my husband. He's a potter, a sculptor and a painter, and the site was designed to showcase his work. The gift included a domain name and perpetual updates. He's never had a Web site before and was so impressed with the idea that I could have gotten anything I wanted for about a week.

In hindsight, I realize I should have taken more advantage.

He spent the next few days taking new photos of our studio space along with shots of some pottery he had been working on. He also spent a good bit of time looking up information including titles, sizes and exhibit information. Some of the portfolio pieces I had initially marked with dummy text like $priceless and with sizes like really"xbig" which didn't really fly.

I included a lot of dummy text all over the site. It was meant to be funny on Christmas morning, but then replaced with information my husband was supposed to give me later. And the idea did spur multiple readings and a lot of out-loud laughing, which was the whole point of not using "Lorem ipsum" everywhere.

What I wasn't ready for was how much he liked that silly dummy text. He liked it so much that he chose to keep the bulk of it on the site. As is. He said if people couldn't handle his sense of humor, that wasn't his problem. I protested at first, but eventually gave in, and we ended up keeping all the references to beer and how much his wife totally rocks.

Really, I'm just the designer. Who am I to argue?

Napkin doodles @ Leo's

This is Space Boy.

I drew him on my napkin at Leo's Pub & Grille, Mount Pleasant, PA.

He says not all space boys are from Mars.

Things I'm learning about myself while cleaning

I started a massive throwing out of (what is turning out to be) the junk in our office space, and I'm finding out some things about myself as I go.

First of all, until the last few years I didn't feel I had actually created an illustration until I held it in my hands, so I printed out everything I did, and sometimes in several copies. What, exactly, did I need those for anyway? Now I have a huge stack of illustration pages that are waiting to be recycled sitting illustration-side-down at my printer. The rest are in a box until there's room on the stack.

Second, my mother typically bought things in relative bulk just because it's cheaper, especially if whatever it is you're buying isn't going to go bad anytime soon (like in your lifetime). The problem I seem have with that theory is the "isn't going to go bad" part. I bought stuff that wouldn't go bad physically, but that went terribly bad personally, digitally, stylistically...

• I went and got married in the middle of this career which, of course, is a good thing, except for all the business cards that state otherwise.
• Shortly after I ordered a new batch of promo postcards—and shortly before I received the shipment—we changed from a street address to a post office box.
• Somewhere in the middle of all these things I changed my illustration style.
• And as if that weren't enough, I also updated both my graphic design and illustration branding.

So domain names and contact information all needed to be updated which now means, along with the old business cards, I need to throw out any old postcards that I could have used as handouts.

I also spent a good bit of money to participate in a directory that the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators sent out which included giving me a stack of 500 tear sheets of my page to use as self-promotional pieces. With my old name. And old contact information. And old style. Those pages were printed on glossy paper, so I can't even recycle the backs of them in our printer. Another stack for File 13.

And third, add to all of this the fact that computers and their programs have a half-life of around 13.7 days, so after they've sucked in their last breath, you're the one left holding the coasters. Yes, that says "Windows 95."

What a waste.

What have we learned?

1. I don't need to print things out unless I need to.
2. It isn't necessary to take advantage of printer deals that offer twice as many of something for just $3 more.
3. My husband is stuck with me, if only for the sake of the environment.

Napkin doodles @ Dino's Part 2

This is Giant.

I drew him on my napkin at Dino's Restaurant in Latrobe, PA.

He doesn't like when you refer to him as "jolly."

Napkin doodles @ Dino's

This is Ted.

I drew him on my napkin at Dino's Restaurant in Latrobe, PA.

He says "hi."

Gingerbread Men-At-Work

Illustrators I Greatly Admire: Exhibit E

AnnaLaura Cantone

I first came across AnnaLaura Cantone's illustrations a while back as I flipped through a Houghton Mifflin Kids catalog and found Prudence and Moxie by Deborah Noyes. The combination of the illustrator's looseness and her confidence in her mark making made me rip the page out to explore her work a little further.

Of course the page went in the pile, as pages tend to do. I finally found that catalog page as I was cleaning our office space last week, and I took a minute to see if I could find more of her illustrations.

Her Web site looks as though it's under construction, but the animations that run on the front page are awfully cute. After some more searching I found a LiveJournal page with a ton of her illustrations, but no real explanation of what I was looking at (not in English, anyway) except for the few self-explanatory book jacket images.

I've bookmarked the blog page and will be returning periodically when I need to remember where I want my illustrations to be. Loose. Confident. Quirky without apologies. Definitely worth another look.

Dear Fall: If I had appreciated you more, would you have stayed?

(The trail photo is from September, taken while riding my bike on the Great Allegheny Passage.)

I'm already tired of the snow. And the winter. And the scraping of the car every time I want to go somewhere. And the gloves that you can't use to do anything except keep warm. And it really isn't even winter yet for another two days.

I'm not sure I can survive three more months of this! Steaming cups of hot chocolate, now that's what I'm talking about.

We've had one day this month above freezing, so until that day the snow just kept hanging around with no way to melt away.

Oh, and the day it was above freezing? Yeah, all day freezing rain. It was the front edge of a nasty storm that dropped another seven + inches of snow on us overnight (please see ruler picture to the right). So the freezing rain froze, and the snow piled beautifully on top. No, seriously, it was beautiful. (Just take a look at the ruler picture. The trees? In the background? See? I told you.)

Maybe I didn't appreciate the other seasons enough. Maybe I complained about the humidity one time too many. Maybe I sat at my computer too much instead of going outside.

Why can't spring and fall last as long as summer and winter?

On the bright side: After Tuesday, the days start getting longer, and then winter will have to hit the road.

Tuesday.

6:38 PM.

"Steampunk Heidi" is finished!

I think I'm finally finished with this one; I really don't know what else I can do with her.

I'm about to send her off to Tomie dePaola, and we'll find out on January 3 what he thinks.

"Steampunk Heidi" color #1

Here's the latest on Heidi.

The background texture is a combination of a watercolor texture I painted a while back and a photo of my concrete driveway. I tinted the watercolor a reddish tan to help with the steampunk look, and the driveway layer I left as gray.

"Steampunk Heidi" sketch for Tomie

Starting this year, SCBWI is taking over sponsorship of the Tomie dePaola Award, although Tomie will still be choosing the winner. I'm not expecting much of a look from Mr. dePaola, but it does give me a subject for my next postcard.

They're looking for an illustration based on the opening paragraphs of the classic Heidi by Johanna Spyri. Tomie claims he wants to see "an image, a style, a vision that I've never seen before!" (exclamation mark included) I'm having my doubts that that's entirely true, but I'm going to enter anyway.

This is the sketch I came up with:

I wanted to add a little bit of my own twist to the illustration by giving her a steampunk attitude. The timeframe would be right-ish, and the goggles were especially helpful for a reflection of the Alps.

Addendum: As an aside, here are the scrap paper thumbnail ideas I was playing with. I guess technically I went with #2.