Why Nike is Right!

frog copy 3.JPG — Yup. There is really no reason why not to “Just do it.”
Actually, there are plenty:
I don’t have time.
I might not be good at it.
I have other priorities.
That dream can wait.
I’ll start that next year.

And many more. So, ultimately, it is up to you. Up to you to decide: do I or do I not really, truly want to work towards that nagging dream, whatever it is. Learning something new, reaching a physical goal, creating something, organizing, sharing, bringing people together, or risking all for an adventure.

I’ve come to call it jumping off cliffs. I have jumped off a lot of cliffs: as a very shy person, making a living on a stage as a puppeteer, presenting in foreign languages, working and making connections in very far away places and totally unknown cultures, not to mention parenting. These are all decisions made to jump into the unknown, trusting that you will figure out what you need to know on the fly, and will land more or less intact, and that the next jump will be a little less scary.

IMG_7783 copy.jpg — Teaching teachers of English in Bahrain for the US Embassy about arts integration strategies using puppetry required the trust that this could be the universally useful tool I had experienced at home. I was invited back there twice, so that cliff was worth jumping off.

So I am now sharing my journey as picture book writer and illustrator. The pandemic has forced me to change my priorities, due to lack of access to classrooms and audiences, to what I have been craving for a long time. Yes, I have loved the travel opportunities all over the world, and have learned so much from children in classrooms, but the next cliff is the learning curve on many levels on writing, illustrating, social media marketing, and all that is involved there.

I’ve been writing a lot, very inspired by the SCBWI Big-Five-Oh Summer conference. My challenge now is the work to illustrate my stories. I have always built all my puppets, made all staging - I have been a visual storyteller, and I am used to sharing my own interior vision. I’ve worked in many media, although never thinking of myself as a visual artist, as everything I made had a further purpose: the perfomance.

Blanche & swamp woman2.jpg — From second iteration of The Talking Eggs, with hand puppets.

As a sculptor, I work with shapes, and have found I love working in paper collage. For quite a while, I worked in digital collage, but missed the tactile element. Inspired additionally by a fantastic class on the domestika site, I’m now painting paper for my imagery. I’ll share my process here.

First, a quick video of the painting process, which is really fun. I collect all manner of objects and tools to make a mark with paint, let them play together, and see what happens! I used: