If I were the type, I’d totally design this for reals but I’m not, so it won’t get any farther than my budget photoshop mockup. Besides, I’m sure there’s a product like this floating around out there already.
Although, I think something like this is probably more accurate:
(it would come in a variety of hues & genders, naturally).
My friend Megan is launching her Spark Girl spring line tomorrow night at JEM Gallery!
date: Friday, April 24 2009
time: 7pm
place: JEM Gallery – 225 East Broadway, Vancouver)
Spent a couple of sunny hours down at the beach yesterday, sketching with a friend. The resulting painting wasn’t very successful, but it was the start of a good exercise.The beach is full of driftwood, including this huge stump, so there is endless subject matter.
Things are a bit quiet here right now because I’ve been working on a picture book. I’ve sequestered myself on an island just outside the city where I am fortunate to share a large studio space. When I need to get away from distractions of my city studio, I come here where everything is very quiet, the nights are very dark and the most lively thing going on outside the studio window is bird drama, caused mainly by a large band of Steller’s Jays and sometimes by the occasional, optimistic attempts at bird life made by the neighbour’s cat.
I have settled into a routine of sleep, eat, work, evening walks to the beach and sometimes some yoga to fix drawing-induced aches and pains – and repeat.
Currently, I’m blogging my picture book process drawings on my children’s book website. I was a little nervous to do it at first – I wasn’t sure I’d have much to put up there – but I’ve had a bout of productivity while working here so the posts have been somewhat regular. I’m also nervous about announcing projects before they’re printed, published and shipped. Things being as they are these days with the economy and the Canadian children’s book business being its good old precarious self, I’m not too willing to tempt fate or count chickens. (I like to reserve what superstition I have for this very purpose.)
This is a portion of one of the panels of a screen my grandma painted some years ago. It’s always been a favourite of mine. The whole thing is 12′ long by 6′ tall and made up of 6 individual panels.
My grandma paints intermittantly now and no longer in this style. She finds painting on gold leaf physically tiring – especially at this size. Much of the time painting is spent tipping the panels at just the right angle to avoid glare. The subject matter, however, is still very similar – birds and plants. It kills me how she can pick up a pencil to draw, sometimes after a break of 1 or more years, and produce an absolutley perfect little bird or bud or leaf. She insists that when I’m her age it’ll be the same for me and that even when she’s not drawing she thinks about it. But I do the same – I just find when I’ve had time off I need to retrain the muscles in my drawing hand and reconnect the line between my eyes, my brain and my hand and I just don’t seem to find the same ease with it as she seems to.
Back in October I wrote about the King Eddy Lives event in Calgary. Darren has now put together some short films of the event and posted them on the Resolve Design vimeo account.
There are a few versions:
If you’re not familiar with the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) passed in the United States in August ’08 and set to come into effect on February 10th, 2009 you’re probably not the only one. The ‘popular’ Canadian news seems been rather quiet about the whole thing. I heard about it only because I got an email from Small Magazine at the beginning of the month calling attention to it and its possible effect on small handmade toy companies. And then I forgot all about it:
The CPSIA rules now requires all children’s products, including natural handmade toys and clothing to be tested by a Third Party Lab, often at a cost of up to $4,000 per item. That could cost a small company more than $20,000 a season.
–Small Magazine
Christine Visneau & Olivia Pintos-Lopez
I was reminded of it the other day when my publisher mentioned it in passing. (Apparently it effects books too – I did not know that.) However, If you are a small toy manufacturer, etsy artisan making toys and items for the under 12’s, or are a children’s book publisher in both Canada and the States, I’m sure you know about what’s going on.
With all that’s happening with the economy today, and all the promises this politician and that politician have been making in the United States about creating and keeping jobs in America, this act seems a hastily and poorly thought out solution to a very serious problem (lead levels found in some toys). It also seems a little counter productive since many small handmade toy companies offer toys crafted of natural, sustainable or organic materials as alternatives to large mass marketed products that may be made of PVC, stuffed with synthetic petroleum-based fills or non-organic cotton or constructed from wood from non-sustainable sources. The act seems like a good start, but the execution seems a little off. Or at the very least, confusing. And that confusion isn’t helping things either. Especially where books are concerned.
From a Canadian perspective, what happens down south, has a huge impact on us in the north. Especially if you have anything to do with children’s books (which do not appear, at this time, to be exempt). However, publishers are fighting the inclusion of books (and here’s an update on that article). But it’s already having an impact and at least one publisher that I’ve spoken to here in Canada who distributes books in the US has started to feel the effects. In an industry as fragile as the Canadian children’s book industry is, this is not great news.
From the Publishers Weekly article linked above:
CPSIA FAQs
• The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act goes into effect February 10 and requires third-party testing of all products for children 12 and under, including books, audiobooks and sidelines. This includes older products on-shelf as well as books shipped after the deadline.
• AAP and other industry trade groups are lobbying to have print-on-paper and print-on-board books exempted. They also are looking for clarification on testing protocols and other specifics.
• If the Act stands as currently written and interpreted, significant costs and longer production times will negatively affect publishers and retailers, potentially putting some out of business and causing books to be removed from stores, libraries and schools.
• The industry is struggling to comply with the Act in time for the deadline, even as it waits for resolution and interpretation from the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
For the latest updates and clarifications, go to www.cpsc.gov/about/Cpsia/cpsia.html.
–Industry Scrambling to Comply with Child Safety Act
By Karen Raugust — Publishers Weekly
The passing of this act brings up so very many issues and arguments… And I could go on and on and on but they are perhaps more eloquently made by other people in the various discussions on this topic taking place elsewhere in the World Wide Inter-Tubes. And the point of this post wasn’t to get into all that anyway, believe it or not. In fact I’ve gone on much longer than I originally intended (as a sometimes-children’s book illustrator I am a bit attached to the industry so I get a little carried away). I meant instead to focus on CPSC’s inexplicable and ironic logo design.
If lead and phthalates look like us now, then nothing the CPSA can do will save us.
[Thank you to Darren who has impressive logo-recall powers and first noticed that the CPSA logo looked oddly familiar…]
#2 Misuse tools
It is snowing again. This might not seem like a big deal, but since it’s snowing outside my window and that’s Vancouver out there, I can assure you it is. It’s snowing on top of the snow that arrived over Christmas and they’re not just those big sloppy pseudo snowflakes usually delivered to Vancouver, they’re the ones that mean business – the small, dry innocuous ones that slowly, deliberately and patiently bury your car and maddeningly delay your bus.
1. When cleaning the studio become distracted by poorly executed, failed and abandoned sketches or paintings and make feeble attempt to resurrect or fix them.
(I had all sorts of grand plans to paint my own postcards while on my travels last summer. I managed to paint, write and post 2. I got caught in a rain shower with this one, the third, so it ended up a bit destroyed – paint flowed into carefully planned negative spaces, wouldn’t dry fast enough in the damp and smeared during transport, and an attempt to save it with an over-drawing in ink just made things worse.)
Charlemange is way off in the distance in the center. The busy square emptied out when the shower hit and everyone ran for cover. This is just afterward, when they started to come back.
I’ve updated the sketchbook part of my website with a few more drawings from a recently canceled project. I’ll probably take them a little further on my own and use them for style and medium experiments.
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After spending most of the year not painting, this is a first getting back into it piece. It’s painted over an old oil sketch I did in college, on a badly primed piece of panel (that’s why the vertical lines). It’s meant as a bit of a *throwaway piece – something to do to get the feel back but not feel too precious about. The reference photo was taken in July during a trip to Orkney. I stayed with cousins on their farm in Orphir. Our room had a view of Scapa Flow, the church yard where the ruins of Earl’s Bu and the round church are, and the fields and fences seen in this painting.
Kirsti Wakelin 