Support Social Justice – Buy Some Art!

Dear Friends,

These are unusual and important times.

I believe we are at a tipping point in America. We can move forward with
equal justice, equal pay, equal care, and equal respect, or we can fall back
into the mire of racism and prejudice.

I am not a lawyer or a politician. I am an artist. I have tried to use my
art to make this world a better place. Now I want to do more if I can. So I will
be selling original artwork from children’s books that I have illustrated to
raise money for the Black Lives Matter movement. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to organizations that support social justice and equity.

To start, I have chosen some of my favorite images from BOOM BOOM, by Sarvinder Naberhaus, published in 2014 by Beach Lane Books.

I will post the images with prices and information on Instagram (@margaretci) and Facebook. If you are interested, please follow me there.

Additional news: Books Around The Table will be publishing new posts every other week, rather than every week as we have been doing. I am stepping back from children’s books for a while to work on other projects, but I will continue to post occasionally as a “guest” blogger on this site.

Thank you for your continued support of our work here at Books Around The Table!

Margaret

 

Boom Boom Arrives

Some of you may remember me working on a book titled BOOM BOOM (by Sarvinder Naberhaus) from some of my earlier posts here and here. I finished the illustrations in June, 2013. The book came out on October 7 of this year. That’s roughly 15 months of waiting. Long enough for me to almost forget about it. But not quite.

I received my artists’ copies last week. Opening a book that I’ve illustrated for the first time is like revisiting an old friend in a new house. I feel excitement, as well as a bit of trepidation. The art can no longer stand alone; it must work as part of a BOOK. Will it all come together? Will readers enjoy the pictures? Did I miss something when I sent it off to press, that now will be painfully obvious?

Most important: Do the images speak the way I intended them to? The biggest challenge of this particular book was that there is no story, no characters, no narrative arc to follow. Naberhaus’s text consists of sixteen words, each repeated twice. The only thread which links them together is how the couplets progress through the seasons:

Boom
Boom

Flash
Flash

Drip
Drip

Splash
Splash

This isn’t the first time I have created a visual story to accompany a non-narrative text. I did the same with Light Up The Night, among others. While having a story to follow can simplify the process of illustrating a book, my aim is always to augment a story through the illustrations, so my approach with BOOM BOOM just meant taking that idea to it’s full extent.

So what story did I want to tell? It needed to be a story that I felt an emotional connection to in order for the images to tell a compelling tale. When I thought about the stories that I have written thus far, I saw a common theme between them: Friendship. Finding, making, losing, keeping friends . . . these were the most valuable lessons I learned growing up. Who doesn’t remember those experiences which teach us about how we may, or may not, fit in?

So I had sixteen words and thirty-two pages to get my story told. The text opens with the onomatopoeic first few lines suggesting a potentially frightening storm. I saw a shy little boy terrified by the loud thunder and flashing lightening, and a more outgoing, slightly bigger little girl enjoying the excitement, yet feeling concern over her preschool-mate. After the storm passes, she brings him out to share in the fun of splashing in puddles.

But the best friendships travel on two-way streets, so in the following sequence, the boy is the one to comfort the girl.

Bloom
Bloom

Buzz
Buzz

Blow
Blow

Fuzz
Fuzz

The seasons progress to Winter, and through their friendship, they enrich their larger community and establish their place within the group.

Crinkle
Crinkle

Crunch
Crunch

Fall
Fall

Bunch
Bunch

It sounds better in pictures.

Swirl
Swirl

Blow
Blow

Silent
Silent

Snow
Snow

I enjoyed the freedom that the sparse text gave me to explore my own visuals, and I think it came together well. If you have the time, go check it out at your local bookstore or library and see what you think.

And if I do see anything that I missed before, well, I’m not telling!

Studio Housekeeping

Since I last posted here, I have sent off the art for BOOM BOOM, a 32-word picture book (each word is repeated once so it’s really 16 words, twice) by Sarvinder Naberhaus. It was a mad rush towards the end (it always is) and after I shipped it out, I felt joy, relief, and just a touch of fear (what if they don’t like it?…). Then the next day I came back to this:

What a mess!

Because the techniques I use involve many different tools and materials, things tend to spread out a bit.

My workspace gets kind of cluttered.

Pretty much every surface gets covered with something.

When I run out of horizontal space, I go vertical.

Since I usually am printing more than one image at a time, I need to have a lot of colors available on my inking table.

I try to keep them from drying out with saran wrap, and in order to keep track of what detail is which color, I started labeling the saved colors with a marker (and to keep track of the nine children I feature in the images, I gave them all names). All this needs to get scraped off and wiped clean.

And then I have to clean all my tools.

Plus there is the added detritus left from mounting the art and packing it up.

It feels good to be done with a large project like this at last, but also a little sad. I’ve enjoyed working on this book. I’ve lived with it for many months now. I will miss these characters and their world that I’ve made up, but I look forward to seeing them again, in a year or so, in their new home – the book itself.

Shopping For Art Supplies

Things are heating up in my cluttered, but lovely little studio. I am working on the finished illustrations for BOOM BOOM, and I need to replenish my stock of art supplies.

First stop, Daiso, the Japanese dollar-store franchise and my idea of a fun time.

This is what I call a good haul: a sink mat (“prevent slips without scratching dishes efficiently”), sink drain covers (“hair prevent sheet for overflow of a bath”), foam craft stickers, cellulose sponge cloth, plastic lace doilies, various shaped erasers, silicone container wrap, silicone hot pads, silicone coasters and a silicone cleansing pad (“It fits the form of the nose!”).

You see, as a printmaker, I can use whatever I want to make images. As long as I can cover the surface with ink and print with it somehow, it’s worth toting back to my studio to test out.

I keep my test swatches in a large binder. When I want to embellish an image with a texture or pattern, I look to see what I have that might work. I’m not sure which of these new supplies will end up being used for the images in BOOM BOOM, but I’m sure at least one of them will.

I also find items to print with at hardware stores, fabric stores, and thrift stores. I store the materials in drawers in my studio. You can see I’ve accumulated much stuff.

When I get to talk to kids about the books I’ve worked on, I like to show them some of my art materials and have them try to find where I used the textures in my illustrations. And I tell them that you don’t have to get all your art supplies at the art supply store. You can make art out of all kinds of things, you just have to keep your eyes open and think like a printmaker!