Orange Monster

So this month is my Illustration Month and I plan to spend at least an hour drawing a day - so I need to do 30 hours on this in the month of June. I am starting off with my trilobites for Art Evolved and then moving on to finishing off my Art Journal for Escape Into Life.

If I get through them I have characterisations for my contract (which will not be going on the blog - sorry guys!).

I think this may actually take up all the time but incase it doesn’t I also want to get some rough sketches of Hetty Peglar and her friends, house etc… done.

I now have alot of things to be getting on with having been comissioned to write a children’s book series (YAY! Victory dance!) but I still need to keep up the personal goals - especially as I feel I will need skills learnt from them for the contract work.  I thought about things about and realised I wasn’t really getting enough time to draw and paint and work on my characters for the picture books.

I’ve had people ask why don’t I hire an artist to do this but a) that costs money and b) I have fixed ideas of the styles and looks of the books and I like drawing and painting and mucking about with images on the computer.  So I have lots of stories that if not finished int he polished sense are ready enough for me to be working on the characterizations at least.

This is why I have decided June is going to be my Month of Illustration.

So hopefully I will have a list of projects and a more formalised plan by the beginning of the month!  Again wish me luck

In doing the NaPiBoWriWee I discovered that one of my stories was infact part of a series - There’s a Dargon in the Compost Heap turned out to be about Jean and her House Dragon Horace.  These were another of my story ideas from PiBoIdMo.  The thing is I think I feel more stories in this series building in my brain as we speak.

It is bizar I actually seem incapable of writing anything that is not a series :/ My husband even teased me saying that he was suprised I hadn’t written down a huge list of All Possible Dragons and used colour pens to colour code and then turn it into some sort of spider diagram with attributes and evolutionary conections between them.  And the problem with him saying this is now - it itself has started to try and be a picture book idea :/

This is one of the reasons I need to set myself goals and take part in the writing challenges - I have so many ideas that it is very easy to side track myself :/

Oh well - we will just have to wait and see what happens to the Dragons and how big their empire grows

I have finially finished my NaPiBoWriWee challenge it took a good long while i.e. a week extra - this is mainly becuase though there was only really two stories left to write these were:

1) There’s a Dragon in the Compost Heap

2) Earth, Wind, Fire

And these were longer stories than the Hetty Peglar ones - in fact Earth, Wind and Fire is more a novella with pictures in it I would say.  Also though this story is finished it is really very much not finished :/ I need to do some research and make sure that some what I’ve written is not complete drivel!

Anyway - I need to let these stories sit for a while now before I really do anything else on them.

Well I have five and half picture books written - I’m not going to finish the challenge but I’ve decided it doesn’t really matter - I have almost six drafts which is more than I would have had and as it’s all the Hetty Peglar stories done - it should give me enough time to sort them out before halloween.

In the end I didn’t start writing until late on the 3rd of May and was basically trying to write two stories a day but it took me a little while to get going with the actually rhythm of writing for some reason.

Anyway my plan is to continue until I have all seven stories written anyway - I am devoting a solid hour to writing each day and specifically picture book writing too.

I found that the old academic diary was perfect for my needs and alot of the writing is scrawled not sticking to the lines and often actually written across the double page like it’s just one big page (hope that makes sense).

Anyway as far as I’m concerned it was a success even if I didn’t finish (plus I made a tonne of new twitter friends

It is the first day of the National Picture Book Writing Week and I have realised I am away doing things until late on the 3rd . I am taking my note book and hope to maybe get some writing done in the car!

I spent last week looking through my lists of picture book ideas from PiBoIdMo which I did in Novemeber.  I have selected 7 stories which I have written basic outlines for - I may post these in due course.

Anyway here is the list of titles i will be writing about

1) Hetty Peglar and the Skeleton Dance

2) Hatty Peglar and the Pumkin Ball

3) Hetty Peglar and the Dragonfly

4) Hetty Peglar and the Spooky Reunion

5) Hetty Peglar’s Batty Bat Balinda

6) There’s a Dragon in the Compost Heap

7) Earth, Wind and Fire

Next week sees NaPiBoWriWee or National Picture Book Writing Week which like the NaNoWriMo and PiBoIdMo is a writing challenge and yes I am doing it!

This one involves trying to write seven picture books in seven days and to make it worse I am away for the first two days of it!  This means it will involve note book scribbling - infact I have an old academic diary that I use about a week of - I am already writing out story outlines in this in preperatio.  I am also using ideas I came up with during PiBoIdMo.

Namely the Hetty Peglar titles, plus There’s a Dragon in the Compost Heap and Earth, Wind, Fire, Water.

I have a Hetty Peglar story already written which I want to find to make sure I keep things all in the same vien!  Anyway wish me luck for next weeks madness!

I have been producing a lot of visual poetry at the moment - I’m really sure if that’s what it is but it’s sort of a mix of writing and visual art for me. This month I have as well as Scriptfrenzy been taking part in a poem a day challenge NaPoWriMo but as I did WoPoWriMo in February I decided that I would do mainly visual for this one.

I think there is a huge cross over here as I’m not sure if I am illustrating a poem or creating a visual poem half the time!

My efforts will be appearing on Turquoise Monster and I may post some of them on here.

Because I am bonkers and love my writing challenges I am currently taking part in Script Frenzy which is a sort of off shoot of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and I have decided to a comic book script of it!

I’m mentioning it here as I will abviously be illustrating this at some point and am having to work on the basic story board anyway. The comic is based on the over all story arc that my NaNo novel is part of - the novel starts in the middle - the comic starts at the beginning!

It’s a science fiction story but may seem fantasy at times and I want to do some fun things stylistically with the drawings and set out However this is a steep learning curve and I can already tell I am not going to meet this challenge but am in stead laying the foundations to be able to next year:) I hope to share the process of the pictures on here but the general story stuff is chronicled on my Nanowrimarian Monster known as Purple.

I didn’t manage to get any illustration type stuff done for the stories but I did use the glove puppets when I read them out at my little girls Easter Egg Hunt - I had a room full of over excited, chocolate filled 3-9 year olds, a lot of whom where five!

There where 17 of them with a few older and a few younger ones tagging along for the ride - and to my astonishment they shut up and listened! Though I did have to tell the adults off for talking to much in background The kids loved the story but then there were the puppets and they where having a fun day anyway but afterwards it turned out that the adults hadn’t realised they were my stories and thought I’d bought them especially for the party. I’m viewing this as a very positive thing.

So I am very very pleased and hope to have the illustrations done for both stories by Easter next year so I can release them as books

The only thing I will say is it’s alot harder than you think to have a glove puppet doing something whilst you’re reading or doing something else!