STRIPPING DOWN

 This is what I'm up to presently.  I'm embracing the pale blue origin of this book and making sure all the page art, even though it a lot was drawn and scanned on white paper, looks like it is on our light blue stock.



When a page looked like this and this,

now it should look like this and this,

more or less.

Somewhere in the middle of drawing this book and seeking inspiration from other kid lit, I discovered that I really love limited color art design, specifically where the page is one color and printed on it are one, two , or three colors of ink tops with the addition of line art in black or really any color. The fewer colors the artist can get away with using without losing visual interest the more enchanted I am, the more I am drawn to enter the world being created. I can only assume this has to do with the principle that the less information provided in a medium, the more opportunity there will be to activate or draw out the audience's imagination. (Think radio)

So, this is exactly what I'm setting out to do. I'm choosing my limited colors from common risogragh colors (a future post) and seeing how stripped down I can keep the color palette. An added benefit to the style is that I could draw attention to certain objects by choosing to color them and leaving very little else with anything but the light turquoise of the page.

Progress updates to come...

REFLECTION ON PROCESS - BEST PRACTICES

It's Fall now. A lot has happened since my last post - death, moving, selling a house, a new position at work. Coming up - more moving (to Olympia from Seattle) and a change of jobs. Regardless of all this, I do my best to direct energy into the book. Our last meeting which was early in October, let us see we were ready to attack colorization - to start working with color in earnest towards finished art.

Looking back at my process and the evolution of my artwork for this, a few things stand out:

· IT'S BEEN AN ORGANIC PROCESS - I had some strong influences along the way but mimicking isn't my wont and I how they were going to influence me I wasn't going to dictate. After some early explorations, I decided on the level of cartoonishness but beyond that I have been mostly feeling my way.

· FIRST IMPULSES ARE OFTEN CORRECT - I struggled plenty with the face and head of the toddler and some with the mom but Dad, Sister, Grandma, and Scout worked right off the bat. Also, the look of the pages; the art was a very natural development that established itself at the very beginning. Blue Colerase pencil on light blue paper. I'm not sure anyone in the group understood why I was doing it - maybe thought it was some eccentric artist silliness - but, eventually, they grew to accept it.

· STAY TRUE TO YOUR ESPRESSION EVEN IF OTHERS DON'T GET IT AT FIRST - If you are working within a group that gives you leeway to explore, the best choices get a chance to prove themselves and eventually be embraced. If you don't have that freedom, well, that is unfortunate. The best books are often by creators that are given (or insist on) creative final say.

I feel very fortunate to be working with this group. They have brought out some of my best work.

copyright Cafe Maroc 2018

Upcoming Meeting - Getting It Together

A meeting has been scheduled for April 10th. The creation team will assemble and review where we are and decide where we are going. It's been a couple seasons since we've done this. In the interim, I've been chipping away at my self-assigned drawing challenge - all revisions. Now what needs doing before this meeting convenes is to supply digital files of my new work to Chad (our graphic designer) so he can have his go at constructing the book, as an InDesign file.
This will be a major step towards completing the book. So far, our earlier iterations were done before all the drawings were complete and therefore it was just a taste of what Chad can do with my drawings, or, I put the book together and it lacked any of the design work from Chad – this was the naively designed update shared at the last meeting.
During the last meeting we were contemplating hacking the story and pictures back until we had a shorter more suscinct story. We finally decided against it and I'm excited to be making the needed changes and to see this book come closer to the final vision we've held for so long.

Here is an example of the kind of revisions I'm doing.  

Bottom image is the revision.

This is our hero and his assistant heading off after the mystery.

Pain and Healing

I have multiple things that keep me from this work of being an artist and illustrator. Some are psychological/behavioral along the lines of procrastination. Some are responsibilities and life, such as being a father and helping my partner take care of her ailing mother and being the father of a toddler. Also, having a day job (BIG ONE). A really problematic one has been something a lot of artists deal with and that is muscular-skeletal pains in the arm, hand, neck or back. Drawing or painting can be hard on the all the parts of the body involved in sitting for long periods hunched over a table while focused on making careful marks on paper or canvas. For me it is pain in the back, neck, trapezius part of shoulder, and thumb. That is accompanied by numbness in the arm and hand. The pain often gets so intense it is absolutely prohibitive to working on my art.

After suffering with increasing levels of ouch for several years, I got myself to my general doctor to discuss this pain and see what could be done. After getting an x-ray of my neck at a subsequent appointment, it was determined that I have degenerative arthritis. This was disheartening but not surprising. Armed with this fact, I have booked physical therapy sessions which will focus on alleviating some of this pain and strain though massage and whatever other means.  These begin next Monday and if my insurance can cover enough of the cost this will be ongoing.

Another tack I am taking to alleviate the symptoms I'm experiencing is meditation. I have increased mindful meditation to almost every day for 40mins. This it making a real difference in my baseline bodily tension that I carry around with me and has lowered my general levels of pain from an average of 4-6 to a 3-4. These numbers are based mainly of how I feel while at my dayjob which can be the most challenging time to stay relaxed. A good deal of the pain I experience is, I believe, the result of a unwieldy amount of anxiety and PTSD-based tension I carry in my body.

I am hopeful that I can feel better and do more drawing in the near future. Reversing some of this debilitating pain has become a real priority and I'm doing what I can to take care of my self.

Photo of latest drawing pre-coloring