Wednesday, June 29, 2011

My Creative Space

I'm at the beginning of a pretty big project (well a new pretty big project). 
I'm attending a five week children's book intensive 
On Saturday I pitched a book, in rough thumbnail form to a class of mega-talented artists who are working on their children's books in the intensive too. I had forgotten how nice it is to be in a safe place with talented people. I get that at job-job but it's in a robot direction. Saturday was remarkably refreshing. I read my manuscript and showed my thumbnails and they wrote things on their copies of the things I was reading. I got a lot of feed back and that was a good good thing. Here is a smidgen of the things they said:
  • I think you can make this really funny. Right now it's pretty funny, but I think you could make it hilarious
  • I'd like to see more emotional humor in the pictures
  • Can you make this shot 'over the top'?
  • I really like the tone. I can hear four-year old talking through this book. Don't lose that!
  • I can tell you know how to empower kids. I think this book will really resonate.
  • I am obsessed with the elephants in your portfolio. Maybe it would be good to have a similar change of scale and composition here?
  • I love your patterns, I can't wait to see them in backgrounds (This hadn't even occurred to me)
  • I want the tension to build. I would love for this book to be ridiculous by the end.
 There were a lot of other things we talked about and that I learned, but these are the things that I want to work on before my next workshop two Saturdays hence.
So tonight my creative space is this:

 And a little of this:
Then I started to pout, because I am high maintenance wanted to make this closer to scale and I only had an itsy bitsy bit of clay. Also: under the light the clay was starting to bake. Fail.
A light bulb appeared above my head and I ran off to craft closet. I return victorious mere moments later. Yes, somewhere between being handed my diploma and arriving here tonight I forgot that I used to spend forty hour weeks with my peers stop motioning some animation. Of course clay bakes under high light and of course you need this, if you are going to get anywhere
This play will never bake. It's permanent grease and sculptural plasticity. It can be anything you have in mind. Think it's cool? Then you can try to move it in undetectable increments until you regret waking up. Luckily tonight I am building a one night only kind of thing.
As you were.

3 comments:

  1. lol! I love it- hesitation on the threshold of the shiny spatula of who knows what.

    ReplyDelete
  2. oops, I'm really sorry about that! clumsy me! :o( I didn't find an email, so I thought it was ok... pop me an email if you want :o))

    ReplyDelete
  3. Not to worry chicky! I hadn't realized I'd lost my email link with the redesign. Thanks for letting me know!

    ReplyDelete