balloons are wishes

"Balloons are wishes.  

The winds made them."

-Carl Sandburg

 Rootabaga Stories

I've been drawing lots of balloons lately.  Here's something new from last week...

all I ever

"All I hope to say in books, all I ever hope to say, is that I love the world."

-E.B. White

Another SCBWI summer conference has come and gone, and once again I feel so grateful to be part of this community of writers and artists that care so much about making books for children.  As Lin Oliver said so beautifully,  

"There is no friend like a friend in ideas."  

As someone who lives in a small town, far from the cities where so many book makers live, SCBWI has been my avenue for connecting with this community.

So it is with a heart full of gratitude that I say Thank You to SCBWI for the honor of being chosen for one of the Portfolio Showcase Awards.  And a very big Congratulations to the other Portfolio Showcase Award Winners:

Michelle Thies

Amy Hevron

Anne Berry

As well as the artists who were chosen for this year's Mentorship Program:

K-Fai Steele

Meridth Gimbel

Nicholas Hong

Anne Berry

Kisoo Chai

Molly Ruttan

I really look forward to seeing everyone's work continue to grow. 

 

sketchbook, SCBWI LA 2015

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration.  Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.  If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.  All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.  Things occur to you.  If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.  But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.  Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive.  You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case." 

-Chuck Close