the day the tails were given out
From "The day the tails were given out"
story by Lisa Grainger, based on a Xhosa tale from South Africa
illustrations by Tina Burke
School Magazine
vlog: my latest release!!
SCBWI winter conference, NY
This one enticed me for three main reasons:
A) The Friday, full-day Illustrator's Intensive focused on "Books and Beyond" (particularly ebooks and apps); something that's of interest to all of us. (I know there's info and discussions all over the internet about this stuff, but sometimes it's more fun to be told in person.)
B) Mo Willems was speaking
C) I ♡ NY
So I booked my ticket.
This conference is HUGE. Approximately 1200 attendees, all buzzing with excitement and chatting about the industry, and cram-packed with amazing, quality speakers. It was a beautiful thing. I love writers and illustrators conferences. I find it so inspiring to listen and learn from the best, and even more importantly, get to meet and mingle with like-minded souls. This type of work can be fairly isolated, and getting out and speaking to other passionate people is incredibly energising and uplifting, and just good fun.
My conference highlights:
• R.L Stine gave a fantastic talk over lunch - for a guy who is the king of creepy, he is incredibly funny and charming.
• Seeing the amazing work in the Illustrator's exhibition
• Pretty much everything Jane Yolen and Mark Teague said, on the picture book panel.
• Pretty much everything Mo Willems said, on the humour panel. (Though I wish he'd had longer to present).
• Meeting some Toronto authors and illustrators who promptly invited me to join their monthly meet-ups!! Yay!! I can't wait!
• Agent Dan Lazar's talk. Considering his talk wasn't really relevant to me (he was focusing on novelists), he was very funny and informative.
• Alessandra Balzar's talk (co-publisher of HarperCollins imprint, Balzar & Bray). Aside from being very interesting and informative, she's simply a great speaker and very inspiring. I love when people just know their stuff, and present it so clearly and with such enthusiasm.
• Going back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twice. I know it's not actually related to the conference, but it's my favourite place in the world. Even one of the security guards commented on how happy I looked.
• I got to meet up with my friend Serena Geddes, and meet and hang out with the FABULOUS group of Aussie writers and illustrators that made it over: Katherine Battersby, James Foley, and Angela Driver.
So. Much. Fun.
l-r: Serena, James, moi, Katherine, Angela
gelato in snowy Times Square? Yes, please!
Favourite quotes/take-aways:
from Jane Yolen and Mark Teague, discussing picture books:
from Mo Willems, discussing what makes something funny:
Interestingly, Mo (Mr Willems?) also mentioned that Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus wasn't initially written as a book. It was just a series of doodles in a sketchbook, until someone pointed out they could be a book. I love the idea that it came so organically, not being forced, and as a result is such a quirky and unique book. (So yes, people, perhaps all your nonsensical doodles might just amount to a bestseller yet!)
For more Mo, there is a short pre-scbwi interview with him here.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I was interested in learning about apps. I'll cover that bit in a fresh post very soon. But for now I'm off to doodle.
sneak peek - a funky fairy
Here's a sneak peek at one of the main characters ...
... but that's as much as I can show for now — more details soon, as we get closer to the publication date (it's soon)!
I had fun designing her little outfit :) And she also has a fabulously girly castle. I can't wait to see the finished product!
I *heart* bird art
I was just updating my portfolio, and came across some more images from Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave.
Part of what I loved about illustrating this book (aside from what I have already mentioned), was the fact that one of the main characters was a bird artist! Like me!
I have been fascinated with birds — particularly parrots — since my late teens and have been drawing and painting them ever since. I find them wonderful subjects, so elegant and interesting, and they give me infinite inspiration for what I call my "grown up art" (if you're interested you can see some of them here).
So it was fun to mix things up a bit, and create these little artworks for the character's wall in this book ...
(The little parrot with the big eyes and beak is from my first book "Fly, little bird" :)
happy mother's day!
Happy Mother's Day to all those mothers (and mothers-to-be!) out there. On special day's like this I feel very far from home, and wish I could be back in Australia with my family, having bbq salmon on my brother's deck with a flock of king parrots in the tree above. But my thoughts are there, and with all of you today! I hope you take some time out to be good to yourself, and have a lovely one!
IMAGES:
"Sophie and Scarlett were helping to bake a cake..."
from Sophie Bakes a Cake
by Tina Burke
"One night Ruby had some news..."
from Ruby Makes a Friend
by Tina Burke
Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave
deadline met and feelin' fine
I now have a freshly cleaned drawing board (*happy sigh* . . . a clean workspace feels so full of potential), after sending off final artwork for Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave, the third in a series by award-winning author Meredith Costain, to be published by Puffin in July this year. (I also blogged about this project here.)
This adventure allowed me to draw a spooky old cottage with a witchy inhabitant, a creepy cave and satisfyingly suspenseful situations — all those kinds of things I LOVED in books (and tv :) when I was young. It's so fun to get to illustrate the type of book I loved to read.
Here's a teeny sneak peek . . .
images © 2010 Tina Burke
from "Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave" written by Meredith Costain
Published by Penguin Books 2010
oliver jeffers
If you're a fan of picture books, or write and/or illustrate them yourself, you're sure to know of Oliver Jeffers' work. I enjoyed watching this behind-the-scenes video, so thought I'd share it here for other fans of his work.
I adore the illustrations, the gorgeous colours and most of all its heart warming story. I think I love it even more now, after hearing the snippet of where he got the idea for the book — from an event in Belfast "where this kid climbed into a penguin enclosure and managed to kidnap a baby penguin . . . "
Honestly, who hasn't wanted to do that at some point?
The story has also been made into an animated short:
A quote from Jeffers, on his working methods:
"I almost can't separate them in my brain:
the pictures define the words and
the words define the pictures."
I liked this description: that's how I feel when I'm writing my books — the images and words usually appear as one, and both are equally as important at getting the story and emotion across.
And on his illustration technique:
"I mix all different types of media together;
an old book cover . . . white pen . . . different types of paper with coloured pencil . . . acrylic paint . . .
really whatever material the illustration calls for at that point."
I love that. It sounds (and looks) so fun and creative — like play. Like when you're a kid with a craft box and you get so inventive with all kinds of mismatched materials to come up with a creative solution (I always wanted to make a real, live working robot. He would walk around on his toilet roll legs, and do my chores with his crunchy aluminium-foil hands).
Hearing and watching how Jeffers works inspires me to be creative, to push myself, to experiment — an artist doesn't have to be a purist, and use only watercolour or oils or pencil or digital. I'm not a purist at heart when it comes to mediums, but sometimes it's easy to forget to look outside the box, and play.
On that note, I'm off to make a robot.
revisiting rosie
↓ These are some my original character sketches I made when first designing Rosie and Ned for the first book - Rosie to the Rescue. I love the characters in this series, and really enjoyed working on these books and in the b/w technique, so I was thrilled to hear that Meredith had written a third in the series! Yay!
I'm about to start on the final cover art for 'Book 3', then we move on to the internal illustrations. The cover is generally the first stage of final artwork to be done, so it can be used for any marketing purposes by the publisher.
These are 'chapter books', aimed at young readers. Chapter books are typically text/story driven, with lots of black and white internal illustrations throughout, so the front and back covers are the only colour work involved. This allows me to have a bit of fun with it, though as this is a series there obviously needs to be consistency in the style from book to book.
Normally I do my children's book illustrations in watercolour, which allows me to leave a strong emphasis on the drawn line; watercolour is soft and transparent so I can have a lot of fun getting the drawing precisely how I want it, then add the colour without blotting out the facial expression or any subtle linework I want to keep. In my own picture books, I use text very sparingly and tell a lot of the story through the characters facial expressions and poses, so it's important I'm able to get the message across clearly through my drawing.
For the covers of these chapter books, however, I decided to go with acrylic as I wanted really strong, bright and bold colours for a dynamic cover - plus, in a nutshell, I love working in acrylic so was happy to have an excuse to use it!
