Happy New Year! A full year has now come and gone. It seems with each year older I become the quicker time goes by. How does that happen? As the year ended I began thinking about 2012 and what I had accomplished. I think it is good to review the goals that were set for the year and how many of them were met successfully. In many ways 2012 was successful for me as far as working towards my creative passions.
My painting still remains important in my quest to be more creative. I have always wanted to be able to pursue with freedom in my painting and I did succeed with this. I finished more than twenty new paintings/collage divided into the categories of abstracts, collage and realistic watercolor. It could have been more, but this was a decent accomplishment, I feel since I also worked on my two new children’s books.
The writing for both of these books were begun previously but the critiques, and editing finally came to final stopping point. Then the work began on the illustrations. My first picture book, Drabsville, already had illustrations that I had drawn previously but were all reworked and redrawn approximately four times each for a total roughly of 160 illustrations. Then there was the learning curve I had to learn with drawing digitally. I found that I loved to draw on my IPad with the illustration/drawing app, Sketchbook Pro. I learned the hard way, making many mistakes along the way which was one reason I had to redraw the illustrations so many times. The writing and illustrations for this book somewhat overlapped my writing and illustrations for my children’s chapter book,
Roland’s Stupendous Imagination And The Native Americans . But this time I understood a little bit better how to accomplish the illustrations more quickly. The illustrations for this book are spot illustrations mostly without background, with a few with background and foreground included. For this book there were probably 30 or more drawings, illustrations. Some of which were drawn several times before I was satisfied with them. There also was a considerable amount of research that was done towards the history of Native Americans, their customs and symbols.
When I think back on all of this, I am proud of my efforts and especially the learning curve that I struggled through. I am moving forward for plans for 2013 which include more exploration with my painting and a new frontier for my books which will include interactive storybook apps. I also have several ideas for new books in progress.
Another new creative adventure begins in 2013!
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