Trudeau's government approves the Transmountain pipeline for the second time

When Trudeau's government approved the Transmountain pipeline for the second time, an emergency march was called. I grabbed a piece of cardboard, my purse-sized sketch kit and a jar of Bleedproof white and dashed out the door. Got the sketch and white under-lettering done on the bus, then most of the colour work while listening to the speakers at the rally. Was able to carry the sign during the march.

Serving time for protesting the pipeline

Sentenced to 14 days for blocking the road to the Kinder Morgan facility. A symbolic gesture because the trucks used a 2nd entrance. There were 5 of us arrested on August 20, 2018, all seniors except for one young woman. We sat on folding chairs on an empty road. My 14-day sentence was reduced to 9, served over 1 day and 3 weekends.  

Friday Feb 9, 2019

Friday night was very long and depressing. Lips and hands so dry it hurt. Thin mattress on concrete bench very hard on my hips. Woke up every hour to switch sides but still face the wall. Light is on all night, but there's 2 brightnesses: one dim, one bright. The dim is still too light for sleeping, so face the wall. 

My supper: first they brought me a frozen chunk of meat and mashed potato with gravy. When I told them I was vegan, they took it away and 30 min later brough a frozen plastic tray containing a "stir fry". Some chunks of cabbage and carrot, 3 small cubes of tofu and rice, all mixed together with vaguely Chinese sauce. Shrivelled frozen corn and peas. Cookie, juice in a box. 

We spend most of the time locked in our cells and get out for meals in a long line of pushed-together tables. Last night we were free to come and go all evening, so browed the book cart. Pretty awful books. All US blockbusters and romances. But apparently they're changed every week so maybe next weekend will be better. Finally chose Prescription of Death by Perri O'Shaughnessy.

Trying to remember to drink a cup of water every hour to hydrate my skin and bowels. Very hard to poo on an ice-cold steel toilet. Plus I have a hard time pooing when I'm this tense. Am so glad to have my mouth guard with me, even though this one is old and cracked.

Sat Feb 10

They woke us up at 730 am for medication. Most of the women lined up for heroin medication. I was there for my antidepressant which I've been taking for 20 years.

The light in the cell stays on all night. There is a bright and a dim. The mattress is too thin. It lies on a concrete base. My hips are aching. Woke up every hour because of it.

Locked up again after meds until 1030, the weekend time for breakfast. No paper or art supplies. There's a cup of stubby orange pencils with very short leads–the kind they leave out in the VPL. The suction seal on the pencil sharpener is broken so it's a 2-person operation - one to try to hold the sharpener steady on the countertop, the other to sharpen. There a rack of forms so I took some to draw on the back.

Breakfast: muffin, hash browns, vegan meat ball, coffee, grape jelly, powdered creamer, margarine,  ketchup, 3 teabags, sugar, and a cup of almond milk, and a slice of white bread. The sachets of condiments and tea are for the entire day. We can put our bread in the toaster in the unit. The "meat" ball was v good chopped up and stirred in with the potatoes and ketchup. I saved my margarine from breakfast to put on my lips and hands–Joy! Thanks to reading about that in The Handmaid's Tale. Must tweet Margaret Atwood and thank her.My clothes: very cheap black & white runners with velcro straps. I'm wearing size 10 because 9s are too small even though I normally wear 8.5s. Chose not to take the sports bra which has a wide uncovered elastic–too tight and nasty.  Dark green sweats: 2 t-shirts, 2 pairs sweatpants, 1 sweat shorts. 3 pairs synthetic black socks 

Other inmates polite and friendly. Very civil, in fact. Lots of please, thank you and sorry. Much better than my experiences of being in school, group home, or blue collar jobs. Quite a few seem to be mothers. One is 8 months pregnant and her baby is kicking a lot. She and another woman talked about labour over lunch which I was interested to eavesdrop on. My meal was 2 slices of white bread, idiocyncratic but not unpleasant hummus, veg barley soup, orange, coffee, powdered "juice." Delighted to get hummus.

Guards are called Ms. This afternoon's is Ms. Mendoza.

Was called to see the nurse to be trained on how to administer drug to a person overdosed on fentanyl, and also got a flu shot. Everyone who comes to the prison is gven an overdose kit to take home with them in case we come across an unconscious person. Many people are dying of drug overdose theses days. I asked for vaseline and she gave me a generous dab in a little paper pill cup. Even more joy!

Supper was felafel balls, boiled potato, vegan gravy, corn and an orange.

There was a wind storm last night, so we are running on a generator. The TV is not working because of it, which is disappointing because there was an ad for Vera on the knowledge network. Must be one huge generator to run a prison.

Put in a request on a white form for a 2nd mattress. Fingers crossed for tonight. In the meantime I made a pad of my 2 blankets which helps. Slept in my clothes in lieu of blankets.

Monday Feb 13

Home again.  I want to try to enjoy the snowy morning, catch up on my work and try to shake off this depression.   

Second weekend in jail

Nasty experience this weekend of being yelled at by guard. No one tells you that if you don't turn off your bright light by 11pm it stays on all night. I was trying to read as late as possible to make myself sleepy. I tapped softly on the window in the door of my cell to get her attention. She came over told me angrily to never tap on my door again unless it's an emergency and too bad about the light. 

Three women chatting

I wasn't allowed to make phonecalls because I was serving weekends. Many women phoned their children. The phones were tricky because you have to bank money with the jail in advance, then get the faulty voice recognition software to work.

My stuff. You aren't allowed to take anything in, but I had a letter from the dentist so they let me bring my mouth guard. I was desperate to bring it because I grind so badly I've lost 2 molars. I showed the nurse the two big holes in my mouth where teeth used to be.

Andy wanted art lessons so I showed her how to practice blind contour drawing, one of the best exercises for developing hand-eye coordination. I asked her if she'd shaved her head after breaking up with someone. She was surprised and said yes. I told that cutting off hair is a universal female reaction to love ending. It's an, often unconscious, signal that you do not wish to be approached. I'd researched this after my divorce and wondered why I felt so strongly that I needed to cut all my hair off.

When it was time to go the guard got angry at me because I wanted to check my purse before signing that I'd received my belongings. You're supposed to sign you've received them before you receive them.  Then I was body-searched by a guard who dug her fingers into my flesh all over my whole body, especially my armpits. It was awful.

Last Weekend

Feb 22
Back for my 3rd weekend at Alouette Correctional Centre for Women. The frozen "stir fry" was actually inedible. It must have been in the freezer for a long time because it took 8 minutes in the microwave for the rice to thaw. But that time the vegetables were disgusting. No tofu and no flavour whatsoever. But someone gave me a cookie and someone else gave me teabags. My guess is the cookie isn't vegan, but I'll go hungry if I don't eat it. New selection on the book cart, so I grabbed 3 and copied won likely shows from the Province TV listings at the guard station.

Saw a third nurse in as many weeks who was also nice enough to give me some vaseline. People who become nurses, like those who become librarians and kindergarten teachers, are mostly kind. Lockup isn't until 630 but I don't feel sociable. I was told Michelle got out this morning. I met her in the van going out to the prison when we were all in cuffs and shackles. She was drug sick. Now she's gone back to the downtown east side. I hope she does okay, but it will be tough.

My shoes are too small. Another woman is shuffling around with her feet hanging out of hers too.  Should have taken the jumbo size 11s. New inmates are very young. A zombieish person with black stubs for teeth "from drug use." Hard to understand what she's saying, but she doesn't say much, just sits beside me wherever I go. Another toothless person is pregnant–a very nice person, she gave me teabags. She's hoping to get into a treatment centre which the others say are very pleasant compared to here.

Sat Feb 23

Woke up every hour. The second mattress is worn paper thin in the middle so doesn't help my hips.  It's weird to sleep with a t-shirt over my head to keep out the light. I don't undress because I'm using one blanket to pad the mattress and the sheets won't stay tucked in, just slide all over the plastic mattress. Plus I just feel more secure with my clothes on. Switched to the dimmer light at 630 because I didn't want to accidentally have the bright one on all night again.

to be continued...

Consistency in illustration style

I'm struggling to keep the style consistent in my pencil illustrations for my juvenile novel Kiddo, due out this spring. The drawings done in numerous sketchbooks, usually on the bus or other locations where I have to wait for appointments or otherwise put in time are all stylistically different. Illustrations where I'm dependent on photo references are particularly problematic.  Then refining the scanned sketches in photoshop produces another style variation because digital pencil isn't the same as real pencil on paper.  Tracing sketches has always produced a lifeless result for me, so photoshop seems like marginally better option. Fingers crossed it will come together in the end.

Pop sculpting alien. Sketchbook drawing with no photo reference or photoshop. I wish I could do all the illustrations in this style. But there's a problem: Pop's motto is "safety first." I'm sure he wouldn't use a tiny welding mask like this, especially with his whiskers. But I like the drawing of his face.  Maybe I should try to reproduce this face in another illustration of Pop and put the full mask on this one.

Kiddo carrying Dwarf Star, a lovable, but very heavy baby. No photo ref for first sketch. The 2nd drawing shows a lot of cleaning and redrawing in photoshop. But it feels over-refined compared to the Pop Welding image at top.

Kiddo confides in Pop while he fixes the sink. No photo ref except for the p-trap pipe under the sink. very messy sketch with quick cleanup in photoshop. Need to redraw either by tracing over in photoshop, or with tracing paper.

Kiddo and Winston on the run. Mostly done out of my head with a reference for the dog. Did an experiment of drawing with blue and red Col-erase pencils, then overdrawing with 2B mechanical pencil. But was unable to cleanly remove Col-erase in photoshop without losing a lot of good pencil overdrawing.

Kiddo putting on roller skates. Heavily reliant on a photo reference and it shows, especially in the face. 

Kiddo and Winston. No photo ref, style is messy, but too idiosyncratic to trace. A case of getting it right by accident which is what usually happens to me. Plus each head is drawn with a different pencil: Winston was done with a 2B mechanical pencil and Kiddo drawn with a wooden 3B. They were on different pages of my sketchbook and I combined them in photoshop. I wish all the illustrations were messy like this or all clean like Pop Welding. Ideally, nothing would be done with close reference to a photo, but there's too many things I need references for. So frustrating.

My 2018

I've been keeping a reading diary for 40 years and every New Year's Day I count up what I've read during the previous year. This year my list comprised:

Novels: 52 read
The best ones were:
My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Emil Ferris. Masterpiece.

The Bartimaeus sequence by Jonathan Stroud. Brilliant audiobooks read by Peter Jones
The Blanche series by Barbara Neely
The Power, Naomi Alderman
Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke
My Life as a White Trash Zombie, Diana Rowland (I only liked the first book in the series.) Southern gothic wonderfully read by Allison McLemore,
The Dark Angel by Elly Griffiths. 10th in the Ruth Galloway series–I've read them all
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse, American Indian sci fi
A Skinful of Shadows, Frances Hardinge
The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, Joanna Cannon

Indigenous memoirs of residential school 
No Time to Say Goodbye: Children’s Stories of Kuper Island Residential School, Sylvia Olsen, Rita Morris, and Ann Sam
The Education of Augies Merasty, Joseph August Merasty with David Carpenter

Nonfiction
Austin Kleon’s Show your work 
Katie Wood Ray’s In Pictures and in Words: Teaching the Qualities of Good Writing Through Illustration Study
Dr Mary Roche, Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks: a guide for primary and early years students and teachers

Many picturebooks: my favourite discoveries this year include
Little Fox in the Forest,  Stephanie Graegin

El Deafo, Ceci Bell
The Funeral, Matt James
Blue Whale, Jenni Desmond

How to Mend a Broken Wing, Bob Graham
Chirri and Chirra books by Kaya Doi
Kuma-Kuma Chan books by Kazue Takahashi
Carletto books, Susanne Rotraut Berner
Iridescence of Birds, Hadley Hooper and MacLachlan
Melvin, the unluckiest monkey, Claudia Boldt
Do You See What I See and So You Hear What I Hear by Helen Borten
My Dog Mouse by Eva Lindström

The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy and On a Magical Do-Nothing Day, Beatrice Alemagna
The Little Black Fish, Farshid Mesghali, Samad Behrangi
The Visitor by Antje Damm
Jerome by Heart, Thomas Scotto and Olivier Tallec
What Does Baby Want, Tupera Tupera
The Little Red Cat Who Ran Away and Learned His ABC’s (the Hard Way) by Patrick McDonnell
Professional Crocodile by Giovanna Zoboli, ill. Mariachiara Di Giorgio

It turns out I actually like teaching book illustration.  My 2nd year teaching in the Illustration certificate program at Emily Carr was very hard work but enjoyable. So far I've taught three levels of picturebook illustration, writing picturebooks, introduction to illustration, and 2 sessions of children's comics. It's difficult because I have to create the courses which takes a huge amount of preparation, study, and research. I also have to lug shopping carts of books to and from the college on the bus in all weather and often late at night.  I envy instructors of degree courses who have offices.

Got arrested: One of the biggest threats to the Pacific Coast and its inhabitants is the Kinder Morgan pipeline which proposed transporting filthy bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. Now the Canadian government has purchased the company and is bent on digging up every last teaspoon of fossil fuel from Canada whether it's unceded Indigenous land or not. So I joined in the protest and sat on the road leading to the Kinder Morgan tank farm. I got arrested and will be sentenced on Jan 18. I might go to jail for 14 days if the lawyer that Protect the Inlet paid for doesn't get me out on bail. Evidently it's a criminal act to try to protect the water and the whales.

Wrote a book and made two animated picturebook trailers. I still have to finish the illustrations for the book (a juvenile novel) and have two new trailers to animate. I should add learning to meet deadlines to my list of New Year's goals but at my advanced age I know there's no point because I'm hopeless.

Spent most of 2018 getting my finances in order. I'm still struggling but things are improving.

My ex-husband died of Huntington's disease at the end of this year. He never forgave me for ending the marriage and refused to be friends. Now there's no chance of that ever happening. He's still visiting my dreams. Here's a 1988 sketch of him tapping along to music.

Joined the Vancouver Urban Sketchers and Instagram.

Bought new art materials after not buying any for decades.

• Caran D'Ache Neocolor II watercolour crayon. Saturated pigment that dissolves into beautiful washes wherever you touch it with a wet brush.
• My ongoing fascination with fountain pens–I haven't purchased a disposable pen in 7 years– has grown to encompass the brush pen! Wow! So lovely to draw with. Mine is the Kuretake Sumi but the Pentel Pocket is a favourite too and available at Opus. Because I'm trying my best to be zero waste I'm eschewing disposable cartridges and using an ink converter and Noodler's bulletproof ink or refilling the cartridges with an ink syringe. I wish Kuretake sold their cartridge ink in bottles because it's lovely. It's very hard to buy waterproof fountain pen ink in Vancouver to use in line and watercolour wash artwork. The Vancouver Pen shop refuses to sell it because they only cater to writers not artists, and believe waterproof ink will wreck their customers' fountain pens. And Opus doesn't have it because they're a monopoly here and aren't interested in people who want to draw with fountain pens using bottled ink.
• The water brush - any brand, they're all grand.
• Sailor Fude De Mannen Fountain Pen for drawing. This inexpensive pen has a bent nib that is wonderful for an expressive ink line.
• Watercolours: Mungyo from Korea and Kuretake Gansai Tambi from Japan. Rich artist-quality paint for a good price.

• Pencil grip erasers. Soft erasers for the end of your drawing pencils, unlike the dreadful office pencil erasers. My new faves are the Faber Castells at The Vancouver Pen store or on the Jackson's website

• I've used mechanical pencils to draw with for my entire life but am giving them up because they're plastic and break easily and the leads only come in unrecyclable plastic boxes. So back to the wood pencil. My favourites pencils at present are the Tombow Mono and the Blackwing soft. The Blackwing's attractive extendable eraser doesn't actually work but slips back in. So you have to stick a bit of paper in the base of the eraser holder.
• materials to do linocuts but haven't started yet

Vegan, organic and zero waste

This year I've driven myself crazy by adding zero waste and organic stipulations to my three years of veganism. My main reasons for these criteria are compassion for animals and insects, and pollution.  What a palaver it is to try to shop for organic, vegan groceries with no plastic packaging! And often so expensive! It's forcing to me to focus on things domestic and do a lot of things from scratch–I practically feel like a pioneer.
Best discoveries this year were that the legumes, oatmeal, and raisins are fresher and cheaper at the zero waste Soap Dispensary than at Famous Foods which wraps everything in plastic. Plus FF's organic legumes must be ancient because no amount of soaking and cooking softens them up. The Soap Dispensary also sells delicious Tempea tempeh which is made without plastic.
Whole Foods lets you buy bulk foods in paper bags but not in your own container. Nada is fiendishly expensive.

Household discoveries! 
Litter box splash guard: I'm probably not the first person to discover this, but I found that a piece of cardboard on 2 sides of the litter box acts as an excellent splash guard. It seems to last forever without getting stinky.

Perfected no-knead sandwich loaf.  Kept experimenting until I got a delicious no-knead bread that fits in a loaf pan and is easy to cut. Organic loaves are too expensive for me to buy.

Tooth powder made from 1 part bentonite, 1 part xyletol, and 1/2 part baking soda. London Drugs now sells bamboo toothbrushes (Humble Brush) for $5.

Coir brushes happily replace plastic scrubbies and brushes. Cheapest and best selection is at Daiso.

Homemade refrigerator jam is cheaper than organic store bought. No sterilizing needed, just a clean jar. Cook any kind of fruit for 20 minutes and thicken with tapioca flour or cornstarch. Grated organic carrots are an economical extender of other more expensive fruit, like apples and pears, provided you add lemon juice and sugar. I picked wild blackberries by the railroad tracks all summer for gorgeous refrigerator jam.

Coconut oil works for butter in recipes and on toast, face moisturizer, and hair conditioner if you rub it into your dry hair after shampooing.

Powdered soap mixed with washing soda in a shaker is good for cleaning the bathroom.

Still problematic for the person determined to be organic, zero waste, and vegan

• it plays havoc with your social life and might even cost you friendships
• affordable shoes
• cat food
• affordable black loose tea
• dental floss
• tofu is murder to make from scratch
• rubber gloves 
• affordable nuts
• stopped buying liquid soap because it comes in plastic but it's hard to find household bar soap for washing dishes etc that doesn't cost the earth.
• how to wash or get rid of fleece and polyester clothing without sending microfibres into the water.

2019 Goals

• Be a better teacher
• Grow a patio garden for bees and hummingbirds
• New picturebook
• Try to convince ECUAD to cooperate with the MA in Children's Literature program at UBC by offering a 400- or graduate-level credit studio course on children's book illustration. We're in the 2nd golden age of children's book illustration and there are no degree programs in children's book illustration in North America. You have to go to Cambridge!
• Do animation or other artwork to support environmental action.