SCBWI article

I wrote an article for the SCBWI newsletter from the Los Angeles chapter. Here is the home for the local SCBWI chapter, which features a link to the Spring 2010 Kite Tales newsletter. (Here is a direct link to the PDF.) Now that I reread it, it seems a bit too serious and humorless. I didn’t want it to be that way.

In the article I talk about how I use  the computer to draw and paint. I don’t consider my digital work an extension of any one traditional method. I’m not doing ‘digital’ watercolors. Or ‘digital oil painting’. It’s a unique, mixed media approach that creates a new technique. It does some things well and other things not so well. And as in any medium, the skill and creativity of the artisan can make a difference.

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When Final isn’t FINAL

This is an older painting. Recently a friend asked to buy a print of it. It took me a bit to find the original, and I was shocked to see that the piece I had thought was the final, finished painting, was actually not the final. The piece I had in my portfolio for years was named ‘house_final4′.

Then I saw ‘house_final5′. I had kept working on it and saved off another version. I just hadn’t remembered. Working digitally means you can truly, never be done with what you are doing (no snide comments about George Lucas and Star Wars) But most of the time the sooner you quit, the better. But not in this case. I like the Version 5 final much better than the Version 4 ‘final’.

Note to self, watch how you use the word FINAL in a file name. Painted in Photoshop from a pencil sketch.

And a detail.

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