Sylvia Hotel Centenary

The Sylvia is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. There is a lovely article in today's Vancouver Sun that tells the history of the this heritage site and mentions the Mister Got to Go books and the cat who inspired them. Here's an illustration from the new book. Working hard to get the art done.

Mr Got to Go Where Are You? progresses - slowly

I rotate from picture to picture while painting illustrations. I'm very behind schedule because it is excruciatingly slow-going trying to create accurate representations of the Vancouver locations while remaining true to the style of the first two books. Here my cat inspects the state of the pieces. That was a week ago. I've completed six of the spreads since then.

A Happy Occasion

Announcing the marriage of Dr. Ronald Jobe and Cynthia Nugent! Not really. I know that's what it looks like, but in fact I'm photographed here with the founder of the Roundtable and namesake of the scholarship given once a year to a Master of Children's Literature student. Goodness, how did an aging illustrator manage that? I'm as surprised as you are. My acceptance speech will explain:

 The illustrator breakfast is my favourite event in the Roundtable calendar - at it I've been thrilled to listen to wonderful children's artists such as Shaun Tan, Marie Louise Gay and today, the brilliant Oliver Jeffers. Every year when they've given the Dr. Ronald Jobe award, I've marvelled at what it must be like to receive a scholarship. 

 The year before I entered the Master of children's literature program was a low point for me as an author-illustrator. It was the end of a penniless winter working on three picturebooks at once, all the cheques were long overdue, my dog was dying of kidney failure, and I had finally despaired of ever making a living as an artist. I ended up in emergency getting morphine for severe neck damage caused by years of hunching over illustrations. And I had begun to hate drawing. When I recovered enough, I started seeing a therapist who specialized in treating artists. She urged me to do a master's degree and, influenced by my friend Kathie Shoemaker, I applied for the MACL program. 

 When I started the course, I had published a dozen books and had received a number of awards - I thought I knew picturebooks. But in taking the wonderful courses of Margot Filipenko, Kathie Shoemaker, and Judi Saltman I realized I didn't know much about them at all. Judi's course on Canadian children's books and her pivotal book, Picturing Canada, on the history of children's publishing in this country showed me how fragile the Canadian children's publishing industry has always been, and that my difficulties in earning a living were not so much a personal failing as a reflection of the precariousness of a comparatively young industry in a colonial country overshadowed by a giant neighbour. 

Studying in the Master of Children's Literature program at UBC has renewed my love of picturebooks, and made me understand their unique status as multimodal artworks. I now feel more excited than I ever have about this wonderful artform and what I can contribute to it in the coming years. 

 It is especially meaningful to me that I receive this recognition at the Oliver Jeffers' illustrator breakfast because of the influence this great artist's work has had on me this past 2 years. When I saw the youtube trailer for the app of his book The Heart and the Bottle I was enraptured. Throughout my illustration career I've longed to animate my pictures - just a little bit - enough to make a small boat tilt on the sea, to make stars twinkle in an indigo sky, for a beam of light to briefly illuminate a scene, to show a heart beating in a small body at a critical moment, or to hear something break. When I saw all of these small repeatable animations and sounds occurring in a beautiful story by someone called Oliver Jeffers in something called an app on something called an ipad I felt as if I'd found an answer to something I'd long been looking for. The Heart and the Bottle was one of the first and remains the best, most artistic, magical, profound, and multilayered examples of the multimodal capabilities of the touchscreen picturebook app. This storybook app has not only become the primary text in my thesis, but has led me to learn animation software, and to embark on designing an app of my own. 

 So it is with gratitude, but some bemusement, that I receive this recognition when I know it is the MACL program, its founder, instructors, and my kind and intelligent fellow students who should be receiving the bouquets because they are the ones who have led, inspired and renewed me.

New survey of picturebooks

Little Big Books Trailer – Illustrations for Children’s Picture Books from Gestalten on Vimeo.

Just ordered Little Big Books because of this wonderful trailer. There's a very nice illustrated review here.

Mister Got to Go Where Are You?

Rough for pp18-19. Mr. G is lost and has found refuge on the roof of an old shed.

Lois Simmie has written a wonderful final book called Mr. Got to Go, Where are You? for the final volume in the trilogy. It will be published at the end of this year by Red Deer Press and the Sylvia Hotel will be hosting a launch party for all the readers as part of the hotel's 100th anniversary celebrations. The launch will be sometime in October to December--the time will firm up as the year progresses.

Right now I'm busily working on the second stage of the illustration process, which is to turn the rough sketches into clean final line drawings on watercolour paper. When the line drawings are finished, I'll start painting. It's going to be very challenging to get the painting done and the art scanned by June 1st which is the absolutely latest deadline Red Deer can give me and still get the book out in 2013.

Our editor, Peter Carver, emailed 2 days ago, curious to see any finished line art, so I quickly snapped 9 photos with my ipad of what I've completed so far. You can see a slide show below or see the set of drawings here.  I don't work on the illustrations in the order they are in the book, so you'll only be able to guess at the plot.

Learning to Animate - Victor Paredes

I discovered the work and tutorials of Victor Paredes in 2012 when I started to make cut-out animation using book illustrations as source material. I wanted to make book trailers and was given a job to create one by Tradewind Books. The promise of a paycheque at the end of the process was a wonderful impetus to keep on keepin' on with learning to animate. For software, it was a choice between Toon Boom and Anime Studio. I tried the free trials for both and in the end chose Anime Studio: I liked the interface better; it offered a lot more kinds of animation for the price; and its process for cut-out animation seemed more straight forward than Toon Boom's. But what really sold me was the animation done by Victor Paredes in Anime Studio.




I am so in love with this young artist's work, his sensibilities, technique, and artistry. And he is an amazingly generous teacher with hundreds of helpful posts on the Lost Marble forum and absolutely wonderful webinars. Here's one that shows his brilliant rigging design for facial expressions. It's like watching magic.

There's so much to learn, but I'm having a lot of fun making book trailers, as well as sprite animation for apps.  Here's a little video of the progress of The King Has Goat Ears app. You can see a number of short animations in it that have been made from the illustrations in the print book. This is a screen recording with the theme music added. The theme music was purchased from a royalty-free audio website. (More on sounds in another post.)



I'm getting compfortable enough with the software to now be able to make a little video in a morning. Here's one made from a screenshot of a book cover by Georg Hallensleben. I adore his Gaspard et Lisa books and hope he'll forgive me for using his cover for a video birthday card for a friend who loves his art.

I've been immortalized!

I always do a portrait of one of the students as part of my presentation. After the one I gave today, I was surprised and touched when one of the students came up to me an hour later with a portrait he'd done of me! Thank you, Trevor ! I think it's a brilliant likeness.  I love it!