Bobbing in Brine
Oh My! Okay, I know I promised you the other day that I would soon reveal Sylvester Pickle to you in all his glory... but that ain't gonna happen. So sorry!
See, Sylvester has started to grow. and grow. and grow. And at this point he has consumed more than half my brain. The little Pickle has turned out to be one dilly of an idea and I think this may be it... the big one. That bolt out of the blue that I've been waiting for for so long... that bitty kernel that would finally implant itself in my imagination, germinate, and become the very first children's story I both illustrated AND wrote.
O. I'll give you a little taste now and then, rest assured. A wee peek at the Pickle. But for the next little while, Slyvester will be literally tacked to my drawing board, busily morphing into my dream.
I'm so excited about this, I can hardly sit still. If I can reproduce what's in my head, The tale of Little Slyvester Pickle is going to ROCK! I've decide I'm going to render it all in graphite. I may introduce some colour, but it will be subtle.
I used to be terrified of colour, way back when before I went to art school. Most of my work back then was rendered in charcoal or pen and ink or good old graphite. And then I discovered the colour wheel and how to create an effective colour palette and graphite fell by the wayside.
But last summer, whilst skimming the children's book stacks at one of those big box bookstores, I came across a book titled Little Bunny on the Move by Peter McCarty and was dumbstruck by its simple beauty and gorgeous pencil illustrations. Hondo and Fabian, a 2003 Caldecott Medal winner, is another of his incredible books. Peter McCarty quickly moved to the tippy top of my favourite illustrators list and I started thinking about the joys of drawing with pencil again. but I didn't really pursue it. Until this past week. And O! I'd forgotten how much I love it! The tactile quality, the immediacy, the joy of a rich black line, the subtlety of shading. Heaven.
And so pencil renderings of Little Sylvester Pickle are vying for space with the dinosaurs littering my drafting table and are multiplying daily. It's a work in progress to be sure, rough edged and raw right now. But O! O! O! is all I can say! Even Jack , whom just last Monday I accused of being the enemy of creativity (not necessarily a good thing to call someone who wears the title of Creative Director day in, day out and gets paid the middling bucks to be called so) is stoked about this.
In the meantime, here's a little woolly something to rotate your sockets around. He's one of the cast of characters from the dinosaur activity book I just completed for the Royal Tyrrell Museum
. His name is Fredrick. He's a Taurus. He is perpetually persnickity, dislikes cats and children, but does enjoy a good nibble of cheese every now and then (goat cheese especially) and is very fond of the Antique Roadshow:
For Salmon, in particular, and everyone in general
Late Breaking News: This morning, whilst perusing the handy TV guide that comes with the National Post on Saturday, I finally learned the answer to something I've always wondered about. Okay, you know Bugs Bunny? Okay, maybe you don't actually know know Bugs Bunny, but surely you know of Bugs Bunny. Well, anyway in the intro, Bugs is always introduced as "...that Oscar-winning rabbit, " right? and I always wondered if he, indeed, was an Oscar winner. Well, thanks to Trevor Somebody of Ottawa who had the where with all (okay...is that one word?!! Is that how it's spelled?!!) to write in to the Tee Vee Answer Lady, I now know.
He is. Indeed. Nominated several times, he won in 1958 in the best short subject- Cartoons category (do they still have that?!!) for Knighty-Knight Bugs .
So, great. A cartoon rabbit more accomplished than me.
More Late Breaking News: I'm having mango chutney chicken for dinner tonight. Last Saturday night (and I forgot to tell you this), I had lobster. At a fancy restaurant with white linens on the tables and candlelight and stuff. Mango chutney chicken is good, but nothing beats lobster in my book. ooo yeah, baby.
Yet Further Late Breaking News: I'm in a weird mood tonight. Can ya tell?
Oh, wait. No. Let me revise that. There is something that beats lobster in my book. It's this fabulous stuff that my mom made during one of our visits. It's Tempura Battered Pickerel (or Walleye for you Americans) with tempura battered vegetables and this amazing spicy Sczechuan (spelling?!!) Peanut sauce. Sounds a bit strange, I know, but trust me... I've never put anything so gorgeous in my mouth before. Or in fact, since.
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