I haven’t updated my blog in a while (a long while) and so much has been going on. My family moved to a different house, a nicer location in the woods in upstate NY but with the distinct disadvantage that my studio was open to the rest of the house (missing a wall and a couple doors) and initially I had to use babyproofing to separate it from the rest of the house, to protect my work and art supplies from my toddler son’s curious hands.
following the move and settling in, came three months of noisy (but much needed) renovations. I was surprised how much I was able to tune out the noise and concentrate on my work, though I think much more of this would have eventually caused me to morph into a prickly porcupine.
In the past 8 months I have been working on creating new illustrations and small vignettes to accompany “The Children’s Story” by Zvi Szir (working title) which is a project I have been working on (on and off) for the past 9 years. I started this project without much knowledge of how the kidlit industry works, it has therefore taken me on several detours (or ehmm, “learning opportunities?!) Ultimately I told myself that “there’s always self publishing” and it is really time to bring it to some sort of a close and send it out to fend for itself... I will perhaps write more about these challenges and this journey later- (maybe when I am wiser… )
The main challenge that I have been encountering again and again is the difference between creating pictures for a story and creating a book. There are so many considerations when creating a book, pacing the visual storytelling and keeping the reader engaged, considering page turns- which pictures go alongside the text? are there places where pictures or text precede each other? how much text on each page... these are all considerations that would normally be the job of the children book editor or the book designer but with this project that was unwittingly approached in an upside-down, inside-out and back-to-front sort of way, such these all became questions which I had to find a way to answer and wrestle with mid-flight.
