The first thing: If you are are a divine being, climbing down from the heavens to create some solid ground on a watery Earth, it’s always helpful to bring along a chicken.

The second thing: Today was a good illustration day. A piece I fought with in the sketch stage, which became my favourite in the drawing stage (when I finally figured it out) and then got away from me during colouring – becoming my least-favourite and causing me much pain and sleeplessness and bad dreams (really) – has come back to me today and was solved! And now it’s a favourite again. I love it when that happens. I just wish it would happen in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

The third thing: This is exactly how things are (except I don’t have an awesome little dog to share my misery with). (via Drawn)

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This post is part of a series of posts documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here. The project began on January 10, 2009, or thereabouts.  Publisher, publish date, author and all those good things will be announced properly in a later posting. (superstitious? Yup, maybe. Not too much, though. Just a little bit. )

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And here’s that little kingfisher from earlier, developed a little further…but there’s still a tangent that needs fixing – where the point of the lower leaf meets the branch. I’d forgotten all about it until I posted the photo. Now that’s all I can see:

At this point, I’m making a second pass at the book as a whole – stuff’s finally falling into place, though there are a couple of pieces that aren’t as far along as I would like. I’ve updated a pdf doc with up-to-date screenshots of each piece so I can check continuity. My workflow and approach has naturally evolved over the many, many months I’ve been working at this, so there are changes in how things start to look and that needs to be reined in. Looking over each page, it’s pretty overwhelming what needs tweaking, finishing etc. Almost paralyzingly overwhelming. And that’s when it’s time to make a list. The list itself can look pretty scary, but somehow, putting these things down on paper allows me to remove them from my mind and free up that space to power the doing. Better yet, I was able to tick off a whole bunch of things on a list I’d made 4 months ago. And even better than that, I’ve got one DONE written in there. And wow, does that ever feel good.

Onward!

A small work-in-progress detail from one of the scenes in the book – fitting subject matter for this time of year.

I’m going to take a couple of days off working on the illustrations to enjoy a very rainy West Coast Christmas with my family. The view from my window today is very, very green. There are even a few blooms on the miniature rose bushes. It’s very unlike the view from the same window in 2008:

Another small part of a page spread, this time with a Malachite kingfisher. And I’ve just noticed couple of tangents that need fixing.

Another little detail from a spread I’m working on. The thin red line is my gutter marker.

My boyfriend and I took off on a spontaneous road trip to Portland, OR for a couple of days to celebrate his birthday and while down there we went to see the exhibit The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum. I have a particular fondness for Japanese woodcut prints, born out of the many hours spent as a kid poring over my grandmother’s collection of books on the subject, so I was thrilled that we managed to squeeze in a visit – it provided a perfect little artistic recharge and the trip gave my eyes a much needed break. 

If you are anywhere near Portland, I highly recommend taking the opportunity to see the exhibit. It’s one thing to see reproductions of the prints in books, and a completely different experience to see them up close. I spent quite a bit of time with my nose about 5″ off the glass. Reproductions, as good as many of them are now, just don’t give a complete sense of the translucency or subtle texture of the paper.

I took a lot of iphone photos of details I found particularly wonderful and wanted to remember for future reference, and also bought the catalogue so I can turn to it when I need a bit of an artistic pick-me-up.

(l-r top)   Katsukawa Shunkō | Ichikawa Danjūrō V as a yamabushi, 1779-81; Keisai Eisen | The Courtesan Uryūno, c. 1830

(centre) Katsukawa SHUN’EI (1762-1819), Hachidanme (Act VII: The bride’s journey) From the series Chūshingura (The Treasurey of Loyal Retainers), early 1790′s

(l-r bottom) Totoya Hokkei | Usokai (Bullfinch Exchange), probably 1831; Ogata Gekkō, Oishi Kuranosuke Yoshio, 1897

The exhibit runs until January 22, 2012.

The illustrations for this book are equal parts traditional and equal parts digital assembly. I’m in the thick of the digital stuff but stop every so often when I need to create more traditional elements. That requires cleaning my desk, just to make it really messy again.

It’s freeing just messing around with ink and a roll of rice paper. After trying to plan and figure out details so much on this project, it’s nice to find opportunities to work without a plan, just let interesting things happen, and let the medium lead the way.

There are minor frustrations here and there – like running out a rice paper and finding the new package I bought from Opus isn’t the same stuff as I bought before, and I like the texture much less.

Raven, Orca & Salmon (detail)