She Sure is {Sketching Again}

Once upon a few weeks ago day, when it was just getting nice outside, the artist and the bosom friend, who is also known as "the running writer",  ambled down one Atlantic Avenue in one Brooklyn neighborhood. They passed a little shop, just a tiny shop - and upon consulting with one another entered its doors. They wandered thru the wares. They sifted thru the stores, and then - it happened! The artist stumbled upon an object of magic!

Then a lot of things happened. Maybe the artist realized she'd forgotten her purse at a nail salon a few blocks away, and maybe the shop keeper was skeptical about the particular mysticism of a particular object, and maybe there was a seagull that chased the poor girl down her block while she carried the object aloft- but at any rate, soon the magical object sat upon the artist's studio table. After the artist had begun to recover from a cold and been to new jersey back and forth, and had a really intense dance class, and took a really long two day workshop at General Assembly and worked like a happy little coal miner at her fancy game designer job-job, the time came to test the power of the new-found object. It had its moment, and the artist pronounced it good. 

All is right in the world. We're back at the drawing table. 

She Sure is {Wandering with Whispering Thoughts}

Psssst.... Lately I've been thinking a lot about 'being nice'. Last weekend I had the chance to go to an anniversary memorial service for a woman who knew me seven years ago when I felt like my life was falling apart. I had just started working at job-job days after ending a years long relationship. I felt like a shell of a person and everything felt overwhelming. I can remember most of my interactions with her, because they always coaxed me in to feeling so good. For hours after we finished a quick five minute chat I'd be calm with the expectation that everything was going to be grand. When I think about her now I am impressed at her wonderful kindness. This week I've been marveling at what a unique thing it is to be able, at the end of your life, and for years afterward, to be remembered as that one beautiful word, kind.

I left last weekend's memorial service for Naomi with a keen sense that I need to try harder. I need to be kinder. I am working on it - which is all we really have to do in this life. As a health coach I am so lucky to be able to coach people to be kind to themselves too - because that teaches me a ton too.

Listening to.. right. this. minute: "Chasing Pavements" by Adele

She Sure is {Sketchy} Swamp Thing

I think I love you....

Those may not be the words, but this week at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, they were exactly the sentiment.

Happy Friday!
Draw your hearts out this weekend, I'm going to ;)

She Sure is {Popular} Scribble me This

As a child, I was a wit. I could dance the hula. I had great hair. I was working on an ever expanding vocabulary. However, it was clear early on that my parents took their greatest reward in rolling me out for this one parlor trick. Draw a scribble. Give it to the girl. She'll make it sing.

 

I was sure my parent's friend's desire to see the girl who scribbled was just a fluke. However, apparently the interwebs and my family and friends all see my worth the same way.  My blog gets more than a quarter of its fame from society's apparent insatiable hunger for "Scribble Drawings". Google brings them  here. So today I scratch my head, and let Jon scribble away on this lined paper, where I build a popular menagerie of mingled line.

p.s. in keeping with today's Illustration Friday theme... I might be responsible for a clean million of the views on this video: http://youtu.be/8UVNT4wvIGY

She Sure is {Sketchy} - Splish Splash

I stood there in the snow, the sand at my back and grinned. 

I take a huge stock in Birthday month. Birthday month is nothing to scoff at. On the last day of that birthday year that I get to spend as the age I am, I sketch like a madwoman and with real intent, my goal to freeze that day in time with a pencil. 

This year, I had to decide, what was I to do with this precious window of time?? It needed to be perfect. So of course in the dead of winter, I boarded the F train and made my way down to Coney Island, USA.  In the solitude and quiet of winter this part of Brooklyn is a spiritual experience of sorts.  

Friends offered to slough the day off of their job-job with me, but I declined. I wanted to commune in the best way I know how, just me, at the aquarium with my sketchbook.

This perfectly perfect day gave me 3 wishes that I have never had filled
in ways each wish was so wonderful that I didn't even know I had it until its criteria had been met.

#1) See an otter bang open a shell. I know we see this on National Geographic DVDs that we all watch religiously....anybody? anybody?  There's no way we get to see this stuff in real life. I was standing there, sketching this guy when a gigantic shell floated down from the aquarium feeding gods above. His delight when he caught it with his little paws was that of a boy on Christmas morning. He immediately went to work slamming it against the glass between me the two of us. He'd turn in spirals and then bang it against the nearest rock before stuffing it in his cheeks to gnaw at it. I was so overcome I barely had time to whip out my pastels. I got a few great gestures in. These two were my fave.

#2) See Sea Horses that are happy and not stoic and creepy in that 'pet store' way. I love sea horses, but somehow they always look so sad. The seahorses at the aquarium were CRAZY. When they are properly cared for sea horses are animated, they're silly, they're goofy centers of attention.

I had a long talk with a marine biologist while I was there, she was in charge of counting babies and making sure everybody got fed. How lucky to be there for feeding time! "Hey, I'm a children's book illustrator, what really important things do you know about sea horses from working here?"

-- "Oh they're the best thing in the ocean but they're dumb as hell."
The quotable biologist hipster (who I am currently designing a tattoo for) let me know that if I was doing a book on seahorses, they needed to look stupid, but lovable. I tried my best.

#3) Change an opinion I've had since childhood. I'm just going to say it. I've never been a fan of seals. Shocking, right? I've been called out on this before, so I'm used to the persecution that comes with abstaining from public mass hysteria for this particular water beast. 

Out in the cold for so long, I forgot all about the time. No one was really at the aquarium on a snowing 18 degree day, soooo no one came to kick me out.  I found myself there way past closing time. See? I told you, this was a perfect day. I was cornered in a segment that houses seals and not much else. When I least expected it, that's where I fell in love. This particular seal takes the prize for the most human behavior I've ever seen in an animal. It was a birthday miracle come true.

Wet and scruffy around the ears, he looked like a teenager dead set on growing his hair out. It stuck out in strange directions all over his head. I could imagine him running pomade through it while his mother scoffed at his vanity. He was perched on a rock overlooking the water.

When I was in the sixth grade we went on a family vacation to Las Vegas. It was there that my kid brother was formally introduced to two things, swimming pools without closing times, and the indomitable all-you-can-eat-buffet. Two days in and about 10 hours behind his normal sleeping schedule, full of everything he could eat in one setting I thrilled to realize he was falling asleep in his heaping bowl of ice cream. Having been allowed a place where there were no limits, he had become a lost boy. He snored into his strawberry with sprinkles, and to this day, I remind him of it when we are on a great vacation or when he's doing something as simple as splitting an ice cream sandwich.

So there he was. This seal was my kid brother, three sheets to the wind with a tummy full of rocky road. He was the kid in class who is trying with all his might to stay awake. I laughed and laughed all alone in the snow and the cold sketching to my hearts delight until I couldn't feel my fingers.

You know how you're next to the guy on the train who is drifting off against his will? That's this guy. He'd doze off, snout closer and closer to his chest until SNAP! He'd jerk his head up. "I'm awake! I'm awake, guys!" At one magical moment he fell SMACK! in to the water. The panic in his face when he jumped up and looked around was the same as a five year old who falls out of bed. "What just happened!?!?!" He calmed down, curled up in a fetal position in with his flippers interlocked, too exhausted to get up out of the water where he went right back in to his "stay awake! stay awake!" routine. Every once in a while he'd raise one arm high in to the air, the better to scratch his nose with.

It was the biggest delight in all my aquarium years, and  you know that's saying a lot. Happy weekend! I'm off to fantasize with people like me at this year's annual Society of Children's book Writers and Illustrators.
This month just keeps on giving! I told you birthday month was serious.

She Sure is {Sketchy} - Not Dragons, Dinos

It's almost 3AM, which always seems like the best time for my concept sketches to get me out of bed.

She Sure is {Serious}

I spend more than eight hours a day with my co-workers at job-job. Since they're all the creative type and well read to boot, the discussion is pretty good. Today I started illustrating bits of it on my little break.

She Sure is {Sketchy}: Walking in a Wonderland

This weekend was my kind of Brooklyn winter dayz. We tapped out at 52 degrees and I wore a denim jacket. It felt like the first day of Spring, the thing I always want for Christmas.

 I slept in (exhausted after an evening of pure bliss in Gowanus). I danced to Spoon in my pajamas -- A very important part of a balanced weekend. I put on one layer of clothing. I grabbed my en plein air kit and shuffled out of the Penthouse at 302 Court without a stitch of make-up or any semblance of plans. I rambled along Henry. I skipped along Sackett. After a long and ambling time I copped a squat at the park to draw some chillins dressed like JCrew models. It happened fast because they hadn't been unleashed without coats in so long their batteries were on full. These are speed sketches.

I read "my slutty book". In evening time I juggled a bit of nothing and nothing to meet a friend at Zaytoons -- the kind of friend that had a baby and moved to Jersey and craves grape leaves --which means I did not have to even leave my burrough (or my block for that matter) AND I ate Shwarma. Yesiree, never any day better. At the day's end, I danced to Spoon in my jeans. I did dishes. I baked zucchini-nut muffins like a boss. I made terse and hilarious innuendo with K. I took a shower hot enough to melt the paint off a Honda. I got back in my pajamas. I watched Felicity (the one where the Christmas tree catches on fire, you know which one). I worked on my new top secret animation project. I got a phone call. I changed out of my pajamas back in to ONE layer, people. I ran to Camp, for a nightcap where I met a man I haven't seen in many moons.....
oh and there were sparklers. Did I mention the sparklers?

This is Brooklyn. 

It is perfect.

Straight from the Book

I made a picture book dummy. These drawings are in there. They are fun.

Also, yesterday talking to some of my less thrown together coworkers at job-job I discovered that a couple of them are working on big projects too. This thrilled me. Then I found out that a couple of them are itching to write a novel but didn't know about NaNoWriMo which begins in a mere 96days and 14hours. There was one other girl who said she always wanted to write a picture book, but didn't have any idea about the SCBWI,  KidLit or KidLitArt weekly tweet chats. She said she really wanted to be a children's book writer one day but she didn't know how to get the right idea. Of course she had no idea about PbIdMo. It got me motivated to compile a list of resources over the next few weeks. So stay tuned, and grab a tutu.

What are the resources you use to tap into, stay motivated and move toward your big goals?

Now I'm off to get rid of my cough.

Thumb Wrestling

Yeah, that's about right.

Children's Book Boot Camp

Starts today!

Illustration Friday - Shadows

When you're the big sister you can totally puppet master your younger siblings into putting on shadow puppet plays behind white sheets. These plays, robbed of Tony awards, can be performed for the forced entertainment of other family members all the time. The puppets don't have to go together. You will most likely make a long and ridiculous antiquated script in which they all meet at an outdoor market in Paraguay.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my siblings. Growing up we weren't allowed to watch television, we had a beach for a back yard, and because my dad watched Disney's Peter Pan, perhaps too often as a young child, we grew up in a "nursery". It was an idealistic upbringing for a future children's animator and illustrator.

I am not going to lie. I know the blind confusion that comes after being sucker punched while reading the Babysitter's Club on your bed. I know the seething rage that comes with stolen missing Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers. I know the sting of being falsely accused of breaking your sister's arm because she threw a box of kitty litter at you, causing you to chase her with the intent of breaking her arm -- before she ran into a tree and did it herself... a different sketch, a different time.

Luckily, I also know the delight of being told in strictest confidence about grade school crushes, first kisses, bad grades and deep scary fears. I know what it's like to have friends that are actually life long.

When I think of shadows, I recall late night runs on a strip of white sand in the moonlight and I think of our Peter Pan nursery. At times you would half expect a boy to show up with a need for a little sewing ;)

Soaked

Lately all my twitter updates ( http://twitter.com/#!/SheSureIs ) have had to do with wanting to stab NYC's torrential rain. It's not MAY showers, people. grr. So you would think something of the like would be the natural 3 minute sketch for Illustration Friday's 'Soaked'.

I however grew up with the world's greatest dog. No. Seriously. In the history of the world no quadruped has been greater. Pal was a Christmas puppy the year I turned 8 and for the first couple years of our relationship, when it came to bath time. I was totally whipped. This is a quick homage to the buddy I miss more often than I miss most old friends.

Happy Friday, yo!

Illustration Friday - A Colorful Lesson

Once upon a time I was told this story.

There once was a crow. He sat way up on a branch with nothing to do but enjoy himself while feeling the wind in his face.

Along came a rabbit. The rabbit looked up at the crow and asked,
"May I be like you and sit all day doing nothing too?"

The crow looked down and sung out
"Why not? It's of little consequence to me."

So the rabbit sat down and commenced doing nothing
but enjoying himself and feeling the wind in his face.

Along came a fox.
The fox ate the rabbit."

---Fin.

Lesson: To be sitting, doing nothing but enjoying oneself, one must be sitting very high up.

Illustration Friday - Lesson

Once upon a time I was told this story.

There once was a crow. He sat way up on a branch with nothing to do but enjoy himself and feel the wind in his face.

Along came a rabbit. The rabbit looked up at the crow and asked,
"May I be like you and sit all day doing nothing too?"

The crow looked down and sung out
"Why not? It's of little consequence to me."
So the rabbit sat down and commenced doing nothing
but enjoying himself and feeling the wind in his face.
Along came a fox.

The fox ate the rabbit."

---Fin.

Lesson: To be sitting and doing nothing but enjoying oneself, one must be sitting very high up.

I liked these little sketches enough to color them. That's a very tall compliment, little sketches. Congrats.