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.

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

Teaching Illustration

I'm teaching CEIL 205: Picture Book Illustration, an 8-week course starting at 630 pm, Tuesday, October 10. The course goes towards an illustration certificate from Emily Carr University's Continuing Studies department.

An illustration of the cat called Got to Go on a shed in the moonlight from Mister Got to Go, Where Are You?

Narrative Games

Very inspired by digital narrative fiction like Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's Inanimate Alice, and most recently, Jelly Bone on the Oolipo app.  Also the exquisite narrative game Lieve Oma by Florian Veltman.

Lieve Oma - trailer from Florian Veltman on Vimeo.

It turns out there are a number of authoring tools for non-coding artists like me, so I feel encouraged to try to turn my children's book The Ducks of Nitobe into a narrative game. I've started a Udemy course to learn Fungus, a free open- source narrative game plug-in for Unity.  I'm on lecture 12 out of 43, and so far it's very good.

colour rough sketch from Ducks of Nitobe

fun with animation

I signed up for the free online course Exploring Animation offered by the Open University.  Here's exercise one, the famous bouncing ball flipbook exercise to learn about arcs and squash and stretch.  Mine was done in photoshop with the AnimDessin plugin and a Wacom tablet.  Bending over a drawing hurts my neck after 20 years of making art, so sitting up at the computer screen lets me have better posture while drawing.

Graduation!

I'm so incredibly pleased to have completed my MA in Children's Literature at UBC.  The program was a life-changer for me and I found in it a world of new ideas, inspiring professors and colleagues, and friendships with people who shared my interest in picturebook apps. My ambitious thesis was a  creative-theoretical hybrid, a new category which was introduced in the nick of time, as far as my thesis was concerned. Dr. Eric Meyers championed my creation of a functional iOS app in a program that until that time only allowed written theses. I'll always be grateful to him for suggesting and arguing for a human-computer interaction model of a design-based study. So my thesis was also the first of hopefully many more such theses in the Children's Literature MA program at UBC.

My MA took the full 5 years. During that time I also illustrated Mister Got to Go, Where Are You? by Lois Simmie (Red Deer, 2014), founded Rascal Media, and started making animated children's book trailers. I also spoke at three conferences, including at Confia in Portugal.

The King's Ears Beta complete!

Finally completed and sent in the beta of my thesis story app, "The King's Ears", to the Canada Media Fund Experimental Stream. Fingers crossed that it passes inspection and qualifies for the 2nd phase of funding. The app is the creative portion of my hybrid creative/theoretical thesis for the MA program in children's literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada. I'm applying ideas formulated by picturebook scholars (especially Maria Nikolajeva, Perry Nodelman, Lawrence Sipe, and Schwarz) to the creation of the additional modes afforded by the iPad. It is incredibly inspiring to be working with Katarina Jovanovic's story, Philippe Béhà's art and the amazing voice of Terry Jones. And I'm so fortunate to be working with such a creative and diligent team: designer, illustrator, and animator Elisa Gutiérrez, and programmers Judy Choi and Trevor Robinson.