Thursday, November 22, 2018

Drawing in Court

I've been going to court to hear the proceedings against a few of the 230 people arrested for protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Today we were in a smaller courtroom without security glass so I was close enough to the action to sketch. Judge Affleck has been handing out some harsh sentences to the water protecters, many of whom are seniors. I'll be in front of the judge on Dec 5 and might end up going to jail. Probably won't draw that day.



Saturday, July 21, 2018

Gelli prints

Tried Gelli printing this week. It's harder than it looks, but still very easy compared to other types of monoprint. You do have to work very fast with regular acrylics, even if adding extender. The acrylic still dries quickly and might tear the paper if you're using very cheap bond and aren't pulling if off fast enough. But like the other kinds of monoprint, every print you pull is a surprise and the medium seems to do a lot of the work of painting for you. 


Denise Fleming used Gelli print for her new book This is the Nest That Robin Built. Her text is wonderful, as always. More about it here.


I took Gelli Plate Printing: Mixed-media Monoprinting Without A Press by Joan Bess out of the library and found it useful. There are masses of Gelli print videos on youtube, but I find they either go by too fast or are too chatty and slow. The book was helpful for me to try one method at a time.


Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Fall 2018: my new illustrated novel!

Kiddo, my new juvenile novel with Tradewind Books is coming this fall.




There will be black & white illustrations inside. I'm scanning pencil drawings, then creating washes
in photoshop.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Clifi - Climate Fiction in Children's Literature

So this is interesting! Cli-fi is a new category in children's and Young Adult fiction. I've read nearly everything by writer Paolo Bacigalupi who writes intelligent and well-researched thrillers about a future irrevocably altered by climate disaster and corporate greed. These include the gripping Drowned Cities YA trilogy and the adult novels The Water Knife and The Windup Girl.



Children's literature academia is catching up and Cli-fi is the theme of the 2019 MLA Conference, which just put out a call for for papers, suggesting the following topics:

- Children’s and YA cli-fi in the media
- Children’s and YA cli-fi and climate change awareness/activism
- Conventions and characteristics of the genre
- Social and environmental justice in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Corporate corruption in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Depictions of altered geographies
- Kinship/community in children’s and YA cli-fi
- Resilience in children’s and YA cli-fi