Wordstock

Wordstock was quite fun last weekend, here's a few highlights:

Marc Brown (Arthur's creator) and Judy Sierra (who lives in Oregon and said Wild About Books was inspired by Portland's zoo and library!) have a cute new book called Zoozical.  They were great story tellers and seem quite sweet.  They have a rather unique working relationship, unlike most author illustrator teams, they do communicate with each other as they work.  Judy said she will email Marc with questions like "would you rather draw a hippo or a giraffe?"  And Marc takes photos of his works in progress and sends them to Judy.  Very interesting!

 

In this photo, from left to right, we have  - Nancy Tillman, Marla Frazee, Julie Paschkis and Brie Spangler.  Kudos to the Wordstock organizer who put together this panel of illustrators!  I do love attending these writing conferences, but sometimes feel out of place as a writer/illustrator.

Marla's latest book (written by Mary Lyn Ray) is Stars.

You should run out right now and buy it, it's brilliant!

Anyhow, Marla said that she made 7 dummies for this book!  It's a good reminder to me that someone as obviously talented and experienced at making picture books as Marla Frazee still needs to put lots of time and sweat in to get it right.   She said that she thinks the problem most new illustrators have is not putting enough time into preliminary planning stages of a book.

Something I'm always curious about is whether illustrators draw bigger than the final printed size of the book.  Interestingly, all the illustrators on this panel work at 100%.  And Marla said she will sometimes work smaller and the work will be blown up!  That was surprising to me as I've always thought the tendency was to work bigger because shrinking a drawing cleans it up a bit.

Pseudonymous Bosch - who had the longest line for book signing and seemed nervous about all the attention (and don't you just love that he's wearing sneakers?!)

Shannon Wheeler - who told me how he got started as a New Yorker comics artist.  He sent 10 comics a week for three or four months before they even bought one!  That's like 160 comics!  And he continues to send 10 a week.  I've long harbored a secret fantasy to have something (anything!) in the New Yorker - I guess this means comics is out - I mean jeez! 10 a week!  I'm definitely not that funny.

Maile Meloy-  said writing for her is editing and that it's hard to ever stop editing.  She compared herself to Bonnard, who would sneak into museums in order to touch up his own paintings!  The Apothecary is her first book for young readers.  I love that cover - think I'll definitely have to read this one.


Not bad for a $10 event!  Ok, back to work now - I may not surface for a couple weeks, need to get some serious editing in myself!