Jan 1!!!!!!!!!!!  Happy New Year!!!  This year I am going to do more of what I love and less of what I think I should do.  Often times I get mixed up thinking that which makes money is more worthy than that which I create, which in this world is a very hard thing to avoid. One of my favorite looks is charcoal on garbage bags, and I think its so important to just put pencil to paper as often as you can and not worry about what it will look like. I had a really fun ten minutes doing this.

More pencil on garbage bags.....trying to draw even though I have no inspiration.  Maybe this is a good lesson for me.  Doing it despite feeling like a fake.  So weird, some days everything comes almost too easy, others you wonder if you ever ever HELD a pencil before.  I try to figure out why that happens.  Are the gods with you one day and not the other?  Was it more or less coffee??   Did you eat well? What changes-nothing I can put my finger on...and so you keep doing, bless the days when it flows, detach when it does not....not a bad way to live your live......

I had one of those great conversations on sat, the kind where all of a sudden everyone is open and trusting and thoughtful and tuned in.  I love those.  But as much as I love the social and people, I also crave my time alone.  Thats why I painted this field.  I wanted to be alone in a warm golden field and just be.

Okay this is just one of the best times I have ever had in my life-and I am not kidding.  I have always been enamored of history, puppets and theatre-and after playing with altoid dioramas for a few years I woke up this morning and it suddenly hit me-Punch and Judy!!!!!!  that crazy duo that has been around for hundreds of years-I have stood in Covent Garden right next to the Plaque that declares the Punch and Judy sighted in the 1660s by Samuel Pepys.  See that is how much of a geek I am.  When reading Pepys diary (and if you haven't, oh what you have missed!!!!)  I almost had an excitement heart attack when I came to the mention of Punch and Judy-Why you ask???  I have no earthly idea.  Maybe it harks back to when I was in grade school and some marionette theatre would come every year and put on shows.    I can still feel the thrill, watching those puppets, watching the story, completely absorbed and lost in it.  It has been a secret dream to do puppet theatre.....oh, how many wonderfully impractical dreamy things I love to do--

so Punch and Judy-in an altoid can-with a back drop-now THAT was a GOOD day

Hello World!!!!

I joined SCBWI last week-I have been weighing what I love the best and it is illustrating-and since I got a taste of it when the book I illustrated came out last Feb, I have wanted more and more, I sent out postcards, made a website, started toying with ideas and then. ... I stopped. I  starting running around doing all sorts of other things, let my beloved gouache dry up, starting taking all sorts of different roads...until suddenly I found myself reading Harold and the Purple Crayon, and realizing how all my life this is exactly what I loved the best.  That I didn't feel any differently about picture books and drawing now than I did when I made my first studio at age 6.  (It was delightful, in a corner in the basement with my own lamp on a two tiered old 60's coffee table, I was in heaven.)
  I sat in the Kerlan Collection a few months back(if you haven't gone, go, I saw the ORIGINAL GoodNight Moon drawings)  with an original Rackham in my gloved hands, almost fainting with emotions.......it was like being in a candy store, or that movie Moscow on the Hudson when the Russian man fainted over all the choices of coffee...........
and so I have decided to just do it. Just do what I know I am good at.  Just do what brings me joy...and maybe...someday I can bring that joy back to someone else sitting in a bookstore, turning that first page, diving headfirst into the story