STORYSTORM 2019! Brainstorm, Play, and Ideas

Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm! Play, play, play! Ideas, ideas, ideas!

These three core creative values pretty much sum up the heart of my creative process. They also sum up Picture Book Author Tara Lazar’s annual Storystorm Challenge, which I’ve participated in for many years.

The Storystorm challenge (used to be called PIBOIDMO—picture book idea month) is a challenge on Tara’s blog where participants agree to come up with a new picture book idea every day for 30 days in a month. 30 ideas! In a month! Seems crazy at first. But no. It’s great. 

Because where do I get my best ideas? Out of a pile of terrible ideas. It’s true. Basically I get my best ideas by coming up with lots and lots of ideas, putting every idea into the pile, and then later worrying about whether they are any good or not. And that same basic concept has now extended into so many aspects of my creative process that I feel it somehow captures the entire spirit of writing and art for me.

My Bureau of Fearless Ideas shirt and my Field Guide To Fearless Ideas poster, both purchased at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company in Seattle, a storefront for the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids.

So in the spirit of fearless ideas, here I am this past week wearing my Bureau Of Fearless Ideas shirt next to my Field Guide To Fearless Ideas poster, (purchased here, more info in the caption). And why am I wearing my BFI* shirt? Because STORYSTORM = FEARLESS IDEAS! And it’s that time of year. I’ve just finished up 2019’s challenge and I’m celebrating all the ways ideas, brainstorming, and play make my art better.

This past year I signed a contract for my first PB after working at it a looooong time. And THE ELEPHANT HIDE-AND-SEEK HANDBOOK (scheduled for release from Sourcebooks Jabberwocky in 2020) was definitely born from this process.

So cheers to fearless ideas and fearless brainstorming! And a big shout-out and thank you to Tara for all she’s done for the writing and illustrating community over many years!

THANK YOU TARA!

The bumper sticker on my car. Bought it at Wild Play zipline course on Vancouver Island, BC. Pertains to art and writing too.

*BFI = Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a real place. It’s a tutoring center for kids. But they also have cool shirts and posters. And in Seattle they have a Space Travel Supply Company. So that’s awesome.

More new illustration

 

Here's one for contrasting emotions.

I started this one with both my kids at home squabbling in the background. What inspiration!

The original paper I used for the scales is one of my favorites. It looks like a basketball in real life:

Meditative drawing

I posted this on Facebook but thought it might be nice to post here too

:

A combination of too much chai yesterday afternoon paired with anxiety from reading way too much about the Paris attacks before bedtime left me wide awake in the middle of the night last night. 

Usually if this happens I get up and write in my journal or read a book or do some yoga and I can manage to go to sleep again. 

I don't often draw when I wake in the night because my inner critic rages at the midnight hour (unless I've stayed up in a manic obsession over a specific project). But I've been teaching art this fall and I showed the kids I teach how to draw Indian Rangolis a few weeks ago. Turns out Indian Rangolis are pretty therapeutic to draw when my brain is in overdrive. 

It felt like a quiet rebellion to use my anxiety as an excuse to focus on beauty for beauty's sake while I cozied up to the stove in my studio. Here are my prayers for Paris and the world, drawn mostly in the anxious hours of the early morning, myself like so many: striving in the face of fear to turn toward the light. 

I'l

l add that I've had a lot of requests for coloring sheets.

Good idea. The

se aren't great pictures because they are just s

napped with the scanner app on my phone but I'll put some up so

on for anyone i

nterested.

PiBoIdMo

I love November. And not just because of Thanksgiving (which is my favorite holiday). The last few years I've participated in Picture Book Idea Month over on Tara Lazar's blog. If you haven't heard of it before, the idea is that you write a picture book idea down for every day in November. I love the brainstorming. I love the discipline and deadline. I love the play that comes out with my later ideas. I love it all.

And best of all...
This year I've already written two new picture books as a result of PiBoIdMo. Woo hoo!

Cheers to anyone else who took the challenge.

New Art: Malaysian Tea Party

From sketch...

To finished art:

Tea time!

PiBoIdMo a success!

Pictured here: my current idea journal before I started filling it.

Almost forgot to give myself a pat on the back for completing Picture Book Idea Month. Yes, I wrote down a picture book idea everyday for the entire month of November.

It was a delightful experience. I learned that I love brainstorming, that good ideas often do come after I've flushed through the first 5 to 10 starts and that I need not treat ideas so preciously -- rather it's great to spout them out! For me, quantity does bring quality in the case of ideas.

Be bold!

If anyone out there also participated and would be interested in trading a sort of idea-critique, please consider yourself invited to contact me! I'd love to have outside thoughts on which ideas others think are most interesting. I can't wait to at least share them with my critique group. (Keeping my fingers crossed that we can meet over the holidays when I'm home).

So I'm sending happy branistorming thoughts out in the world today. I hope you catch some of them.

Drawings

While I'm not going to be able to finish my lofty goal of completing 10 collage illustration samples this month (the following are just drawings),

I'm happy that I feel I've made progress on my main goal: to try to ditch some of the perfectionist in me and speed up.

Obviously I didn't speed up enough to finish.

But, it's a process. Bit by bit. Right?

Plus I'm psyched that I actually like the pieces I'm working on. I kind of didn't expect to because I was going more for quantity, not quality (hard to ditch that perfectionist entirely though). 

My favorite of these drawings is probably the tea party. For that one I challenged myself to try to make some sort of illustration for/about/honoring Malaysia.

While I won't finish these illustrations this month (I'll be in Singapore when this post goes up, tagging along with my husband on a business trip. Who knew I'd get the chance to go to Singapore this month?), I'll look forward to finishing them in the upcoming weeks.

Just thought I'd post the drawings for now.

Keep on keepin' on, everybody!

Like a tree

"The only way most people recognize their limits is by trespassing on them." -- Tom Morris

Sorry for the lack of posts. I suppose in the last couple of weeks I've dropped into the studio abyss. Or, forgive the cheesiness, the a-bliss? I'm hard at work, nose to the grindstone, with samples for a dummy -- some new collages that are just the right kind of harder-than-heck challenge -- and I'm loving every God-blessed minute of it. Sometimes life is difficult. Just the right kind of difficult.
Hey, on a similar note, I think it's fascinating to hear how long artists spend on any given piece. I know full well that I have many a practical peer who won't spend more than one day on a final piece (I've tried it -- I like it. But. The work I'm doing now calls for something different). I heard from an art director that one artist he knows only spent an hour on an award-winning cover. I've also watched a video of Eric Carle at work whipping out those fun and spirited collages he makes in a similar amount of time. How long does your art take? Are you fast? Or are you slow?

Me? With the work I'm doing now, I'm a bit of a glacier, or a redwood tree, I confess. I just finished a collage that I made while listening to 3 audio books, 11-to-14-hour-long audio books. That's right. Thirty to forty hours. And that doesn't even involve the prep work -- making paper, taking photos for the photo elements, painting the painted parts, drawing. Nope. That only includes cutting everything out and gluing it down. It's a rather embarrassing amount of time that, I'm certain, many people would chastise me over (including my family). But, whatever. It is what it is. I wasn't wasting time or anything. It's just what this particular piece called for (I use a surgical tweezers for small bits -- there were hundreds of small bits in this collage). It is what it is.

Some novelists write an entire draft in November (Nanowrimo anyone?) and others take years to finish a draft (even working constantly). And some of the results of both variety are amazing. And some of the results of both variety suck. It's just the way it is.

What works for you? And have you tried the opposite? What were the results?

Paper Marbling

A couple years ago, at an SCBWI picture book retreat with

Denise Fleming

, I learned a simplified version of paper marbling using shaving cream and food coloring.

This past week (after finally getting my paper-making area set up in my new studio) I put that knowledge to use!

I didn't use food coloring this time. Instead I used the paper-making dyes I use when I dye the paper I make. I did this so I could play with color a bit more.

I needed some "river" paper, which is why I took this on.

These are some photos of the blue versions.

I also made some muddy brown marbled paper too.

I'm so grateful to Denise for teaching me how to do this!

And I can't wait to see how it looks in the collages I'm working on.

Lightning Strikes! (A way of taking good reference photos for action drawings)

Lightning strikes!

Literally.

I took these pictures using a method that I worked out during the Nevada mentor program last summer. It's a method of taking reference photos for action drawings.
I'd meant to post about this last fall but sometimes blogging has to take the back burner when there's lots going on. So here we are, better late than never.
While I was drawing the sketches for my mentor assignment, I was having a devil of a time capturing the movement of Dorothy tossing the pail of water on the wicked witch of the west.
When I first had the trouble, I tried what I usually have tried. I set my camera up on a shelf with the self-timer on and posed for a reference photo.
But it wasn't working.
Dorothy looked stiff and overly posed when I drew her. No matter how hard I tried.
I was brainstorming with my (patient) husband one night about it and he suggested that instead of photographing, I try videoing myself tossing the pail. So I did.

And I as I watched myself throw the pail I also remembered that I could pluck a single frame of the video out and save it as a picture. So I scrolled through the video, frame by frame, and picked a frame that I thought best caught the action. I used Quicktime pro to do this (if you are interested, type in "creating a still image from a movie" in help. I believe you do need the pro edition of Quicktime to do this but I'm not sure, you may be able to do it in regular Quicktime).
Voila! I had a decent reference photo that wasn't as stiff. By using the reference photo plucked from the video, I was able to draw a Dorothy that captured the action better. Yay!
Now the witches face...
That one was totally posed.
I bet she'd make the same face if she were caught in a thunder storm.

The Wizard Of Oz, Kjersten-Style, From Sketch to Final Art: Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion

This past summer I took part in the Nevada SCBWI mentor program. My assignment for the program was to illustrate three scenes from The Wizard Of Oz, interpreting the story however I wished. The program finished with a fantastic retreat in Virginia City where I had the opportunity to share my final original art with my mentor and fellow mentees (I loved that I got to see my peers' work after they had gone through the same process -- so fun and interesting!). The following is an abbreviated walk-through of parts of my process as I presented it to them. 


SCENE II

The Text:
From Chapter VI of the Wizard of Oz: The Cowardly Lion :

"Don't you dare to bite Toto! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a big beast like you, to bite a poor little dog!"
"I didn't bite him," said the Lion, as he rubbed his nose where Dorothy had hit it.
"No, but you tried to," she retorted. "You are nothing but a big coward."

Thumbnail:
This is a revised thumbnail I based the final drawing on:

The First Drawing:
To prevent my drawings from stiffening too much along the journey from drawing to cut-out collage I piece together my drawings in photoshop.
This allows me to use the freshest sketches I can as templates when I cut my final art. It allows me to size the characters and other elements of the drawing right without redrawing or tracing them a lot.
Often I'll draw the characters first, scan them into photoshop and re-size them so they are proportional to one another. Then I draw the background separately and piece it together in photoshop.
Revision:

• I changed the Scarecrow and tin-man's poses. While I liked their poses in my first draft, they kind of looked like they were watching a play or resting, rather than being scared of the lion or crumpled on the ground. Plus my third scene had them crumpled on the ground and I wanted variety. I decided to try more active poses. Here's a sketch of the scarecrow in a more active pose that I didn't use for the final drawing:

• In the end I changed the poses but kept the focus of the action on the relationship between the lion and Dorothy. I thought if I got too dramatic with the tin-man and scarecrow, it would take focus away from the main characters in the scene.
  

The Final Drawing:
Making the Final Art:

On Risks and Revision in the final stages of work:
Notice how the greenery changes in the last couple of frames of this photo sequence. Occasionally when I "finish" a piece I decide something I did with the background (that's already glued down) needs to be changed. It can be tricky to peel up one paper in favor of a change --and scary --what if it doesn't work?

Defense one:
I've worked with paper enough making my handmade books over the course of the last decade that I generally can tell when I can get away with it or not. So knowing my medium is defense one.

And if it indeed hadn't worked?
Defense two:
Problem solving and brain-storming. Being creative does not only mean drawing pretty pictures. It also means creatively solving problems.

It's exciting (and terrifying) to take a risk when a piece is almost finished. But my job is to make my illustrations the best that they can be. Sometimes to make things the best you have to take scary risks. You have to know your medium well enough (through lots of practice) to have a good idea of when those risks are worth it. Then you have to know your medium well enough to be able to problem-solve and brainstorm when a risk goes awry and new challenges presents themselves.

Final Collage:
I listened to the audio versions of The Hunger Games, and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins while I made this illustration. I can't look at that forest without thinking of those books. Do you ever listen to books on tape that influence your art?


P.S. I made two other Wizard of Oz illustration samples as part of the mentor program. Here are links to posts about the process for those scenes:
Scene I
Scene III

The Wizard Of Oz, Kjersten-Style, From Sketch to Final Art: Glinda and Dorothy

This past summer I took part in the Nevada SCBWI mentor program. My assignment for the program was to illustrate three scenes from The Wizard Of Oz, interpreting the story however I wished. The program finished with a fantastic retreat in Virginia City where I had the opportunity to share my final original art with my mentor and fellow mentees (I loved that I got to see my peers' work after they had gone through the same process -- so fun and interesting!). The following is an abbreviated walk-through of parts of my process as I presented it to them.

SCENE I

The Text:
From Chapter II of the Wizard of Oz: The Council With The Munchkins (edited slightly to be more picture-book friendly, or in other words, more concise)

Dorothy began to sob, at this, for she felt lonely among all these strange people. So Glinda took off her cap and balanced the point on the tip of her nose. She counted "one, two, three!" And the cap changed to a slate on which was written:
"LET DOROTHY GO TO THE CITY OF EMERALDS."

Thumbnails:
I drew many pages of thumbnails to get an idea of my composition. None of the thumbnails pictured here were ones I ended up using, but they show the process.
Detailed Roughs:
After drawing lots of thumbnails I chose two I liked best.
Both had Dorothy and Glinda in prominent places. Since they are the main characters in the scene I drew them more cleanly, scanned them into photoshop and made rough drawings based on the two thumbnails I liked to help me choose which composition I liked more.
I ended up choosing the second composition because I liked how it showed the promise of Oz in the background. I thought it captured the spirit of the moment better.

Scenes from my sketchbook:



First Full Drawing:Revisions:

• Changed the munchkins to have more variety in their expressions. Even though the original text suggested the munchkins were all sad for Dorothy, they would react to what Glinda was doing, and I needed to show that.
  
• Changed the background so it had more depth -- a foreshadowing of the journey Dorothy is about to embark on.
  

Final Drawing:
Notes of interest: I was at liberty to interpret the Wizard of Oz how I chose. In the book, L. Frank Baum never refers to the Witch of the North as "Glinda." But we all know her as Glinda from the movie, so I edited the text to include her name.

Making the Final Art:

Final Collage:
P.S. I made two other Wizard of Oz illustration samples as part of the mentor program. Here are links to posts about the process for those scenes:
Scene II
Scene III

ROBOTS

I've been working on sketches of the Tin-man from The Wizard Of Oz as part of my mentor program with Nevada SCBWI. I've been scouring the internet for images of robots to inspire me during my brainstorming sketches. I found some irresistible robot goodness and goofiness. Check it out:

Robot A Day: Talk about brainstorming!

Geek Crafts: Does crafty goodness get any better than geek crafts?

Mini-Me Robots: Creepy or cool, you decide

Still going (think energizer bunny with a pencil)! I'm off to draw some more.

Book Dragon, THE MOVIE

Lights! Camera! Action!

PRESENTING:
BOOK DRAGON, THE MOVIE
Starring: The Book Dragon,
As Illustration and As Handmade Journal.
(Wink).
Made by me (Kjersten Anna Hayes).

Enjoy!

What I'm making right now

This is a cool line, BUT it's taken out of context in such a strange way; it haunts me:

It's on a shirt I picked up at Bard On the Beach in Vancouver, BC last summer and It's from a rather disturbing character in the play Titus Andronicus (aren't all the characters in that play disturbing?) by William Shakespeare. It's spooky when a creepy character says such a beckoning thing.

Like I said, the line is like a specter haunting me.

So I asked myself who else would say that, "I'll show thee wonderous things." And here's what I came up with (I settleled on "marvelous" instead of "wonderous"):

"The Book Dragon Beckoned.

"'I will show thee marvelous things,' he said.
"So I climbed on his back. And we were off."

I'm making a book dragon.
He isn't finished.
And I still might change "marvelous" back to "wonderous."

He's a scrappy illustration sample that isn't for anything important. He's just for fun.
I feel like I've dived out of overly-serious goal mood into playland (although I did make the drawings for this guy last month as part of my -- abandoned -- holly jolly goal).

And since we're in playland I don't have to worry that I'm posting too much or giving something away. This isn't a big official capital letter WIP (work-in-progress) or anything. This is an experiment in process to see what I can do and make some interesting illustration samples. So let's see what I can do.

I'm going to share a bunch of scrappy process stuff and photos as I go.

Join me for the ride.

Happy New Year!

P.S. Let's just make this the illustration of the month for December. It will end up as more than one illustration (kind of) So it may be for January too... We'll see.

Illustration of the Month: November, 2008

Okay, okay, I know this illustration is not finished. So maybe, technically, it shouldn't be the "illustration of the month." Call it "sketch of the month," if you must, BUT I post it anyway because...

This month has been all about me working on my current dummy for my Golden Coffee Cup Goal. And even though I'm so far behind I'm almost certain I won't reach the goal by the end of this month (shooting for next month?), I have made huge strides and I LOVE what I've been making.

This is the drawing (which will probably change some when I get to the revision stage) for pages 30-31. It features my three resilient friends, Crow, Armadillo and Opossum in a scrappy patched together treehouse that they build at the end of the story I'm working on. I had an enormous amount of fun drawing it.

I liked this manuscript a lot, but I can't describe how much fun making the dummy for this one has been. It's VERY challenging and crazy to fit all the cluttered stuff that needs to go in the drawings, but it's so, so, so fun. And I can't wait to turn all these things into collage. It's going to be awesome and crazy and it just looks so fun to get into. I just feel like this book is pulling the best of what I can do out of me. Yay for that!

Tree Houses

I love what I do. Today, I'm working on my golden cup goal that I posted a few days ago. The dummy I'm working on has a shack kind of tree-house in it. So I'm doing a bit of research.

I always feel that I should somehow put quotes around that word in terms of my work:

"Research."

Try this. Go to Google images. Type in "tree house." Surf for a while. Draw a few sketches. Repeat with something like "shack" or "shanty town."

That's a sample of how I "research."

Lest you think it's all fun and games though, putting all this "research" together into something meaningful and fitting for my book is a bit like giving birth. You are not sure at all how it will happen, when it will happen, but it will be VERY hard to do, no matter what. Only unlike birth, it isn't inevitable. You may do all the work and nothing may come of it...

Which believe me, can be a let down. But it's a fun journey. And hopefully something will come of it.

Illustration of the Month: October, 2008

I gave myself a challenge this month to make an illustration using a very simple background and a very limited color palette. Here's the sketch:

And here's the finished piece:
I LOVE puppets. I collect them. They are everywhere in my house.



I like the idea of shadow puppets though; think of all the puppets I carry with me in my handy dandy hands!

I watched a bunch of you-tube videos with hand shadow puppets as "research" for this piece. I stumbled upon some super cool videos. This one is my favorite:

Papermaking

The main ingredient in all of my paper art: my own handmade paper.

A couple of weeks ago, my sister happened to be visiting when I made a fresh batch of paper. So I conned her into taking some fresh pictures of me making my fresh paper. I'd already made the pulp when she arrived:

I have an

abbreviated run-through on how I make my paper over at my normal website

(including the pulp-making process).

But I'm pretty psyched to share my new photos so why not go through the sheet forming process right here, right now. Here's how I do it:

I pour my pulp into a floating, framed screen (also called a "mold and deckle").

I agitate the fibers and spread them around inside the frame:

Then I pull the screen out of the water and let the water drain through the fibers back into the tub.

I carefully remove the frame from the screen (or the deckle from the mold).

I press a drying felt (also called a couch sheet -- pronounced "cooch sheet") into the wet paper.

I flip the screen-paper-felt stack onto a pile of other newly made sheets of paper (this stack is often called a "post" of paper)

I sponge out as much water as I can through the screen before...

I pull back the loose screen to see my new paper!

The new paper is attached to the drying felt. After pressing the entire stack of new sheets between boards with a clamp and letting any excess water drain for a while, I hang the new sheets to dry outside on my special drying porch (still attached to their drying felts). When they are dry I peal the new sheets off their felts and voila! New paper is made.

It's raining it's pouring

From final sketch:

To the digital "color sketch."
To the final paper collage art:Voila!

There are so, so, many more steps involved in making an illustration than what I'm showing here.

There's initial character research, setting research, character sketches, setting sketches, searching for the perfect textures to photograph, photographing those textures, making the handmade papers (which is an entire other huge list of steps itself), painting the painted textures and that's not even mentioning what may have come before -- the writing or idea phase -- if the illustration stems from a story idea or a story itself.

But, nonetheless, here are a few pictures of at least three stages of an illustration sample I recently finished. Enjoy!