Illustration Friday - "Worry"

These top four sketches are from my sketchbook this week. I'd like to add a "Sketches" section to my website portfolio. Which ones do you think I should use? I have lots more sketches to choose from too; these were just the ones that I felt went with the Illustration Friday topic, "Worry."

I sketched these two, cute brothers in the subway station in New York. The smaller one kept trying to pull his older brother away from the yellow line that he's not supposed to touch while waiting for the subway. He was sooo worried that his brother would fall in. I think I captured the older brother's attitude pretty well here.

Illustration Friday - "Wide"

A wide chasm to leap across!

I created this piece this morning for my chapter book/middle grade novel portfolio. I'd like to make this into a cover illustration sample by adding a made-up title. Any good ideas for a title?

Illustration Friday - "Electricity"

"The front of the black rock glowed as Bryce picked it up. Odd."

This is another sample illustration with a made-up caption for my chapter book/middle grade portfolio. It goes with the b&w illustrations a few posts ago. I'd love to illustrate some adventure books for trade publishers.

I just finished reading Alcatraz versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson. That would have been a fun book to illustrate (hint: Scholastic, if you'd like b&w illustrations in the next printing, please hire me).

Orphan Works Bill

Have you heard about the Orphan Works Bill that has been proposed? It could devastate artists' careers by allowing anyone to use our artwork and claim that they can't find the copyright holder of that piece of art. Our paintings or photographs can easily be labeled "orphan" and are then open to anyone to use. If we find someone using our work, we need to take them to court, prove that we own the copyright to the image, and then we'll only be compensated a "reasonable" amount for use of that piece of artwork because the infringer did nothing wrong if they claim they couldn't find the copyright owner. It puts the burden on the artist instead of on the infringer. The infringer will have no reason to try to find a copyright holder. It's just wrong.

Illustrators Partnership has set up a website where you can email your Senators and Representatives about this bill with just one click: http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home

If you're a visual artist, please become educated on this issue and take action.

Greeting Cards

The Picture Bookies Showcase theme for the week is "Greetings" so I thought I'd post some of the greeting cards I license. I usually license between 4-6 greeting card designs a year. This image is a small sample my previously licensed cards. Click the image to see the cards large enough to read.

I've just removed my whole greeting card section from my portfolio website, because I want my portfolio to focus more on illustrating children's books, specifically trade books. For trade, I'm gearing my portfolio both toward picture books and toward chapter books, although I haven't yet done any jacket art samples. I guess that should be next on my portfolio sample list.

I also do a fair amount of educational illustrations, so I included a black and white line art section on my website. That kind of work is fun, quick, and pays well. I love creating lots of new characters in black and white line, especially kids of diverse ethnicities, and to create personality in a character with the stroke of a pen (digital pen that is).

My two current goals are to find more clients who need line art and to break into trade publishing. I've just sent out lots of postcards (see my last post) and I'm already getting the next postcard sample ready to send out.

This morning I read a great post on what to include and not include in your portfolio by Cheryl Klein, an editor for Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic). I'm looking through my online portfolio a bit closer. Do you see anything I should remove on www.kristivaliant.com? Some of the pieces that I feel are weaker, others have commented on and said they love. It's hard to know what the art directors will think. I'm constantly changing out the pieces in my printed portfolio. What do you think is my strongest piece? Weakest piece? Anyone?

Promotional Postcard

(Update: I've created a newer blog post on promotional postcards going further in depth on the subject)

A few days ago, I sent over 300 of these postcards to publishers, editors, and art directors. This is a 5"x7" postcard and I placed a label with the publisher's address in the center of the blue tablecloth. I usually get my postcards printed at www.vistaprint.com, but since Vistaprint doesn't do 5"x7" postcards, I had this one printed at www.printplace.com.

Right now, I'm working on illustrating a series of 6 easy reader books. They'll be published this summer, so it'll be a little bit before I can show you a peek at the artwork. It's a really fun series with a theme I really enjoy! I'm also working on some black and white line drawings for educational purposes for another publisher, and I'm trying to find time to work on my picture book dummy for one of the manuscripts I've written. Lots of work at the moment - yay!

Illustration Friday - "Save"

How do you save a crate filled with top secret stuff from the bad guys? Hop on it and slide...

I created this illustration this morning based on the Illustration Friday theme of "Save". It's another sample piece for my middle grade book portfolio.

I just finished reading Max and Maddy and the Chocolate Money Mystery by Alexander McCall Smith. This illustration is sort of inspired by a scene from that novel. In the story, there are dogs who are running alongside the children and helping the children. I thought it would add more drama to have creatures chasing them along with the bad guys so I drew it that way.

Illustration Friday - "Leap"

I created this illustration today for a new portfolio piece based on Illustration Friday's prompt of "Leap." I'm adding black & white pieces to my portfolio that would work for chapter books and middle grade novels. I like adventure stories, so I'm using these two characters in a number of additional pieces. What do you think?

SCBWI Winter Conference Trip - Sunday

Sunday started off with the Portfolio Exhibition awards. Tomie dePaola had a short list of illustrators he liked: Sandre Griffin, Larry Day, Jim Carroll, Andrew Mitchell, and Sarah Stern
And the winner of the Tomie dePaola Award of $1000 art supply gift certificate was Heather Powers.
The winners of the juried exhibition were:
Honorable Mention - John Rocco and John Deininger
3rd place - Alan Witschonke
2nd place - P.A. Lewis
Winner of a full-page in picture book and a trip to NY to visit art directors - Jim Carroll

Susan Patron, winner of the 2007 Newbery Medal for The Higher Power of Lucky, gave us a hilarious list of how she went about winning the Newbery and what she's been doing this whole past year as the Newbery winner. One tip from her list, "Words for body parts may be used where needed if they are of service to the story." In case you haven't heard what was all over the media this past year, Susan used the word "scrotum" in numerous places in her book and many people wanted to ban the book because of it. Ridiculous. It was referring to a snake biting a dog's scrotum and the main character asks an adult what the word means. The adult gives a nice, scientific answer. I think that shows kids that it's ok to ask adults about words that you hear and don't know what they mean. Now that the 2008 Newbery winner has been picked, Susan's husband calls her an Oldbery.

Next was a panel on the path of the picture book. It included Arthur Levine (the publisher/editor), Jonah Winter (the author), John Mason (sales at Scholastic), Tracey Van Straaten (publicity at Scholastic), and Bob Brown (bookseller). But sadly, no illustrator was on the panel. Jonah talked about how he got his idea for the picture book, Dizzy and how Arthur signed it up. The editor helps to focus a book. Sum up the manuscript in one sentence and parts that distract from the main point needs to be cut for picture books. Eliminate extraneous material. After the art layouts were created by Sean Qualls, Arthur showed them to Jonah. Jonah thought the art looked too somber for such an exuberant story, so some changes were suggested to the illustrator and it made the book much stronger. John Mason talked about how wonderful Jonah's reading of the text was, so marketing decided to make a recording of Jonah reading the book and sent that out to reviewers and librarians. Tracy used the starred reviews to market the book further through magazines, newspapers, and the media. Black History Month provided more marketing opportunities. Bob talked about why he bought this picture book for his store and how excited he was about it.

The last speaker was Richard Peck, a novelist. "Our readers are looking for themselves in our books." "Fiction is not real life with the names changed." "If you can't find yourself in the pages of a book early in life, you'll go looking in all the wrong places."

After the conference was over, we all said our good-byes. Here's a pic of my roommate Susan and me:


I stayed for four more days after the conference to sight-see in New York with my husband and to drop off portfolios at various publishers. It was a fun week!

SCBWI Winter Conference Trip - Saturday

"Fire in the chute!" That was Lin Oliver merrily shouting in response to the alarm system going off for probably an hour on Saturday morning in the Hilton and delaying the conference a bit. She said she's always wanted to yell that, even though "it's a boy thing to say." Apparently there was a small fire on one floor of the HIlton.

Lin greeted 1064 conference attendees from 45 states and 10 countries. Yep, it's a big conference.

The first keynote speaker of the day was Nikki Grimes who spoke on the power of poetry. "Poetry is the place where words and music meet." "Poetry at its heart is about painting a picture with words."

Next was my favorite speaker of the whole conference, David Wiesner. I just love his books! Here he is talking about his young days of drawing disconnected arms (you can see his artwork on the screen):

David said that early in his career he became known as the cute lil' animal guy, illustrating books like Owly. He wanted to do more in the line of folktales and fairytales, so he redid his portfolio to show the kind of work he'd like to get. In 1983 he started working on his own wordless picture book, Free Fall, filled with all kinds of imagery he had been working on for his own personal pieces. That book was published in 1988 and won a Caldecott Honor. He's won 3 Caldecott Medals (Flotsam, The Three Pigs, and Tuesday) and 2 Caldecott Honors (Sector 7 and Free Fall). For references, David likes to build models of the characters or buildings in his artwork in order to experiment with lighting, shadows, and perspective. He showed us slides of model frogs, pigs, and buildings. Here are some photos of his process (click them to see them bigger):


The choices for the breakout sessions were all editors, no art directors. I was disappointed in this because the editors seemed to speak only on writing and just skimmed over the illustrators, basically giving the publisher's guidelines for submitting illustrations which we could get online.

For the morning breakout session, I saw Anamika Bhatnagar, a Senior Editor from Scholastic. She's looking for books with unique writing and a strong narrative voice. Picture books need to make her laugh out loud. She likes short, simple, alliteration, rhyming, fun sounds, satisfying, strong verbs and actions. Some picture books she likes: A Birthday for Cow, I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean, and Jane Yolen's dinosaur books. She wants chapter books starring characters she wants to be friends with. She loves school books, grounded in reality for either gender, humorous and satisfying. For illustrations, she likes everything, paintings to cartoons, graphic novels, very realistic to simple, black and white illustrations in books like Clementine. Anamika seems like she would be a fun person to work with.

At lunch I sat next to an illustrator, Carrie Harman, and an agent who spends her time between England and the U.S. The luncheon keynote speaker was Carolyn Mackler, a teen novelist. She was funny, but since I don't have any desire to ever do teen novels, I didn't get anything out of her speech.

For the afternoon breakout session, I saw David Gale from Simon & Schuster. He said he's best known for teen novels (wish I knew that ahead of time!) The few picture books that he does, he wants to be as short as possible, just one line per spread, and he despises rhyme. He wants kid-friendly books with a beginning, middle, and end. His list is full with previous authors and big sellers, so if he takes on a new book from one of us, he would have to take off one book from his list. He said to send manuscripts to the general submissions pile, so that junior editors can pick them up. For illustrators, he basically just read the guidelines from the website. No insight for us.

Last on the agenda for the day was an agent panel. Again, nothing really helpful for illustrators. The agents pretty much addressed the writers. For picture books, we heard character-driven picture books with clever plots that are short, simple, and easy to read, get great reactions from kids.

So overall, this day was for writers. David Wiesner was the only super helpful speaker of the day for illustrators.