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Long time, no see! I abandoned my blog for a while and here's why:
I'm teaching Media Techniques to Illustration Sophomores at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Story Illustration to 4th and 5th graders at Danforth Museum and School of Art.
Also, I spent countless hours working on a new dummy book.
I absolutely love teaching, especially Illustration at my Alma Mater. The energy I get from teaching is crazy. I was a student not too long ago, so I still remember a million questions that I had, frustration, desire to get better, etc. So I try to immerse students in all this knowledge and get them excited about painting and illustration. I drag tons of books with me, show the work of different painters and illustrators. Presentation of painting techniques to a group usually doesn't really work, but helping students individually and checking on their paintings several times during the class does work. It's extremely rewarding to see when something just clicks and a student gets it. I feel like a proud mama! I really hope my excitement transfers to my students and with some of them I think it already did. I already see a lot of improvement in my students since the beginning of the semester.
Also, I'm finishing up my new dummy book, so I can't really show any process. It's based on the characters I developed earlier (Musical Pig+Traveling Wolf). The amount of work that goes into working on the dummy book is incredible. Thanks to my agent Libby Ford and my fellow illustrators, I revised the storyboard several times. The story is so much better now! My mother-in-law Betsy Wish and my husband Ben Wish helped me with the writing. So now finally everything is coming together. Instead of doing pencil drawing for the dummy book, I decided to use ink. I'm a painter after all, not a drawer, so it's so much more fun to do sketching in ink. Hey, whatever works and looks presentable. I've done 16 spreads of those ink paintings, lots and lots of hours painting. Next step - one full color illustration and it's ready to be shown to publishers. Fingers crossed!