Cilantroooo

Took a break from book illustrations to knock out another produce portrait for my kitchen wall. Our local market sells cilantro in giant two-hand bunches with the roots still attached, and I peeled one of the murdered little plants off of the bunch and asked it to pose. It went limp. I stuck it in dirt afterwards, where it died. It is not happy cilantro. But artists don't ask that their models stay alive, just that they stay still.

I painted masking fluid onto the roots. This is basically just thin rubber cement, and it's hard to paint with because it's invisible, but it is the greatest thing ever. It is a skill worth cultivating. I'm going to make whole paintings out of masking fluid and earn more points for Slytherin, because that is some dark magic.

Not sure I like seeing the pen work, but it doesn't bother me enough to ruin it with darker paint.

Framed! With bonus reflection of my neck.

Next: mint.

Probably. While I was driving home yesterday, I had an epiphany about tying illustration reference with home decorating and gardening, and walked in yelling, "I NEED A BONSAI." Or eight. A big shelf of bonsai. I need so many bonsai.

Off to google bonsai pruning.

work in progress

character sketches from this book I'm working on 

Am going blind from hunching over this thing until midnight every night. It is almost finished, which should make me excited but instead is making me panic, like a large creature is sneaking up on me in the minutes I am doing other things, and I need to run and grab the project up and get it done before it kills me. That is productivity. Or sleep deprivation. Also I gave up chocolate for Lent. There is nothing between me and the dementors. A facebook quiz told me that my patronus is James Franco, so I'm pretty much done for.

(art via alicia-mb)

Tapping on my collarbone like a woodpecker.

Typical

Snuck out of bed at 5:30 am. Ran a bath. Put coffee on. Washed my hair and laid in the steaming water. Thought soothing thoughts at myself about the upcoming toddler story time, which was a brawl of flying shaker eggs last week. Had just wrapped in a towel and stepped out of the tub when the door burst open. Little girl came running in, fighting with her footie pajamas to get on the toilet. I sat on the floor and helped her out of them, and the teenager ran in with a kitten dribbling runny poop. Tossed kitten into litter box next to me. Husband ran into bathroom, flapping about the trail of kitty diarrhea leading from the boy's bed and down the hall runner. Little girl declared that she needed an english muffin and ran naked out of the bathroom, through the cat poop.

Toddler Storytime Mosh Pit Hour is looking pretty good right now.

What we didn't need

OH YAY.

I said dogs, right? Everyone heard me say dogs?

We found another kitten.

Fine. Cats it is. Cats on every surface. Cats in the drawers. Cats in the storage compartments.

The kids are fine with this development. They named it Pantalaimon. I dubbed it Panty Liner. They are compromising with Pan. Or Pants. So we can go outside and yell PANTS. WHERE ARE YOU PANTS.

Remorseless children. Shopping for litter boxes disguised as potted plants, for every freaking corner of the house.

VICTORY

Potty training: achieved.

Toddler levels up to little girl.

eta: that's her eating a Burger King breakfast platter with chopsticks, because we ran there from half a block away to use their toilet.

What I've been doing

I tore up a bunch of boxes and taped them together into a little model house, guided by a stack of make-your-own-dollhouse and cottages-in-California books. Then I sat and drew it, and inked it, and stuck (battery-operated) candles inside it to light it. This is the under-drawing.

I had been going loose and cartooney with the rest of the illustrations, but I liked this so well I've had to go back and add more pencil detail to them. I will re-work them until they are dead, and that will be an important lesson. Or they will be great, and that will be an important lesson.

LENT APPROACHES.  I'm giving up staff room snacks and sugars and thick fatty beers. The usual. Fine. The kids are very excited to choke on quarters in their pancakes this Tuesday, so that makes it worthwhile.

In other news, IT IS FUCKING FREEZING. Maybe if it were actually freezing, I could trot outside with a parka and make love-eyes at the snowy trees and it would be fine, but in the middle of the pacific - no. We have no warm clothes and no heating and no proper windows, and I woke up with Zenny cramming her shivering body under my armpit. All the thin blankets in the house were piled on all the beds and they were doing nothing to keep the arctic blast of 50 degree wind from cutting through our pajamas. UNACCEPTABLE. So we put on layers and went to the thrift store to load up on oh-shit-we've-moved-to-the-tropics military discards. Heavy blankets, footie pajamas, jackets with plush linings, a hoodie with panda ears and a front pocket big enough to carry a cat in. The kids are so pleased with the invention of fleece. They have everything on. With no shirts on underneath, because "it's soooo soft", but that is Hawaii for you.

the f word

The other day, the man gave me that cheerfully worried expression that said he was about to try something I wouldn't like. "Hey! How about you spend the whole day having fun with your mom while I watch the kids this Sunday?"

"Oh, ok. Why?"

"Well, I am going to have a brewing day. And invite... friends?"

Friends? What is friends? I suddenly realized that I hadn't made any new friends since leaving Maui. None at all. No friends. I am friendless. And for a moment I felt a flutter of panic, like when you realize that you forgot something important years ago (didn't I use to have sea monkeys?), and then I remembered that I am happier now than I have been since my desert hermit days. Small family, small library, small town, large open spaces, NO STRANGERS IN MY HOUSE. I have never identified with any movie hero more fiercely than I did as a child watching the stranded scientist in Never Cry Wolf as he peed around his campsite and vengefully ate the mice in his food stores.

life goals

So the man tried to get me out of the way in order to socialize with these people I don't know, which I appreciate, but his proposed brewing day fell on Super Bowl, and we don't have cable tv, so nobody wanted to come. "Friends", eh.

Maybe I need dogs. Dogs is like friends.

liiiife

There isn't much going on except for my fevered neck-crinking obsession with this book project. (13/32 pages blocked out and mostly finished.) But I said I would talk about my life and I WILL.

Went to mother's house to help her change her car battery. All the doors malfunctioned, stopped responding to key, and we accidentally locked her out of the car entirely. Locksmith arrived to bust into it; car alarm broke and goes off every time key is inserted into ignition. Car has been rendered useless. Tried to convince her that problems can't be solved until they reach their worst outcome, so we really did her a favor.

Read the Martian. Liked it, despite a "that would be gay" joke that irritated me for the next 50 pages. And despite my willful ignorance of car repair. I can understand mechanics just fine, it's just that regular vehicle maintenance is so much less interesting than shit getting blown up and taped back together in a desperate bid for survival. My emergency skill set is mostly food- and textile-related. I can make tow lines out of twine if I need to, but someone else will need to modify the CO2 regulator.

Knitted 1.5 socks before getting derailed by the book project. Someone else will have to make the tow line, too, I guess.

Went swimming with the kids. I say "swimming", but what happens is that the boys try to drown each other and the girl wants to get in and out of the water, so I spend the whole time breaking up fights and paddling around in circles trying to help the toddler up and down the metal ladder. I finally call it after 45 minutes of nervy vigilance and drag them back to the house for sandwiches.

Injured ankle, discovered bloody scrapes and bruises around shins. Couldn't remember how I did this. Thought it was cardigan-related* for most of the week, then remembered kicking over a huge wheel of butcher paper under the desk and getting leg pinned to chair. Didn't pay much attention to this because I was drawing. So the good news is that I won't even notice a tow line/regulator emergency when it happens; will just keel over and die.

And here is a picture of me, because I haven't posted one in a long time.

* I hang my cardigan on the back of my office chair, and sometimes it slithers down to wrap around my feet when I leap up to be helpful.

refocus

I have a lot of thoughts about digital art vs. traditional media in illustration, but my overriding thought recently has been holy shit I need to actually be able to finish illustrating a book and get a mainland publisher without my kids wadding up my drawings or scribbling on them or hanging off my computer chair. Enthusiastic meddling aside, I only get two hours every evening with these kids, and I actually want to spend it with them. And I can't stay up late, because I can't. The night is my natural enemy. I am the creature that crows in the morning and gets shoes thrown at it. What I needed to do was to whittle more time out of the day elsewhere.

So I invested in a portable mess-free setup, which was kind of a big deal, and now I'm three illustrations into a serious book project. At work. On my lunch breaks. WITHOUT CHILDREN. And I'm obsessed with it. I haven't been really into anything for a long time, and I was beginning to be afraid I couldn't feel that kind of thing anymore. But this book is all mine - written, illustrated, aimed at the mainstream market - and I dream of page layouts and color palettes and character design. I also dream of kisses and footsies, because my sleeping brain can't differentiate very well between one lost feeling and another, but then I shove dream-smoocher aside and get back to imaginary drawing.

I'll still be finishing a drawing a week (or two or three?), but it's a larger work in progress, so there will be less art here and I will be back to talking about my liiiiife in this little space. Mostly about my truck, probably.

REVISED GOALS

1. Finish the book.

2. Submit the book.

3. Publish the book.

4. Rub elbows with Mo Willems and Adam Rex as a peer instead of annoying twitter fangirl.


Yessss.

The lookout for happy

I haven't been feeling much about anything for a few years. My doctor suggested I was depressed and tried to give me something to help with the sadness, and I said no - I'm not sad. I'm not anything. I'm just resting here, it's fine. Moving along in this smooth space and wondering if nothing will turn into happy soon, while being relieved that miserable is over.

 I've started being mindful to notice the happy when it happens.

* sat down with the family to watch a movie, handed Zenny a cup of decaf tea (mine is hot, hers is mostly milk and sugar). She sat with her ankles crossed and the cup up to her face, holding it with both hands and watching over the rim. She drank the whole thing and put the empty cup on a coaster. She looked like the two-year-old version of her twenty-year-old self, which she is.

* drove over a hill in the early morning, saw fog dragged across the farmland in layers of grey and purple. Elbowed Gavin. He looked up and said something about dragons. We drove down into the fog with the windows open so we could breathe the clouds.

* every day on the drive home, we swing the truck onto the small side road, and for ten seconds of acceleration the truck shimmies and rattles while Gavin and I say aaah and listen to our voices shake. When we take the car, there is no shimmy, but we both say aaaah when we hit the turnoff anyway, and then laugh about it. Leif is too absorbed in Calvin and Hobbes to notice, and looks up and says, "What? What's funny?" every time.

* the lilikoi vines cover our front windows. At about 5pm, the sun is low enough to get around the vines and hit the crystal hung in the window, and the livingroom fills with rainbows for 15 minutes. The kids and cats scatter, trying to catch them.

* in the summer the tree drops lychees, and in the winter the vines drop lilikoi. Some evenings we go outside and blow bubbles while the kids pile up fruit, listening to music.

* drawing.

* opening the slow cooker at the end of the day and guessing what I'll find inside.