Dan Santat Bares All!

Ha, I knew it. Filthy. Every last one of you. But as long as you're here, let me tell you about the NUDITY FREE workshop I attended Saturday.
The AZ chapter of SCBWI did indeed bring in Dan Santat  www.dantat.com for an all day art intensive. Yes, yes I know what you're thinking, "Laura, sitting still for an entire DAY?" I will admit, and the folks sitting next to and behind me will attest, that my pants were indeed full of ants by about two o'clock, but the day was was well worth it. Dan brought an entire art studio with him and proceeded to bare his process and technique souls for all of us. The first couple of hours provided a thorough and concise synopsis of my entire Freshman Foundation year of art school, and left me really wishing I could have just read Dan's packet and kept the tuition. He shared dummies, sketches, a traditional painting tutorial AND a Photoshop tutorial, which as a new digital convert had me riveted. It was capped off by Dan removing his shirt (he had another on underneath-you PEOPLE) and scanning the pattern in to demonstrate a computer collage technique. If you attend enough of these events, you become used to the jaded and the condescending. These were not Dan. He LITERALLY gave the shirt off his back. 
I am currently in the early stages of a career reinvention. These things happen to us forty-somethings, but rather than start knitting hemp butter churns and selling them on Etsy, I'm trying to work up the cred to sit at the writer table in the lunchroom, and also bring my illustration style more in line with this writing since as you might have noticed, me likey the funny. I mean, I have a "hamsters with props" calendar for cryin' out loud. For the workshop, Dan had us copy an illustration by an illustrator we admire and for me that illustrator was the amusing and giggle-inducing Mary Sullivan www.marysullivan.com The wittiness of her work cracks me up every time. Go ahead, go look, I'll wait...da, da, da dumdee do dum...See! What did I tell you.
Anyway, Mary has no worries about me plagiarizing. My copy was superficially accurate (-ish) but missing all of the spontaneous joy that makes her work hers. The second part of the assignment was to do another illustration INSPIRED by the illustrator you chose, and this sketch to the right is what I ended up with. You can see a little of Mary in the arms and of course the squiggly line border (I am stealing the squiggly line border, that I can do, if I measure first, and make sure it's straight, and go back over it a few times...) I was snickering to myself while I drew it (partly because it is semi-autobiographical. I'm not sure my sister would find it as amusing.) It was FUN. That for me was the biggest message of Dan's workshop.The work may be frustrating at times, but you should still be having fun.

I have a secret. It is not one I share often, especially with young impressionable minds. Mine is a secret so shameful I can hardly speak the words, but I feel I must share it now, so that all that comes after will seem wondrous. As a young child, I was a...a... a QUITTER.

There. I've said it. Whew. That's right, I was a quitter. It started innocently enough. The year was 1976, and my elementary school was in a fervor of patriotic extra-curricular activities. I somehow found myself elected to the Bicentennial Club, an organization much like Student Council, but devoted to the reporting of aforementioned patriotic activities. I think I attended two, maybe three meetings. Even the requisite small notepad with spiral bound top, something that said, "I have important things to say, so sit down and shut up," could not hold my interest. My blowing off of that post was clearly forgotten a couple of years later when I was elected to the real Student Council. One meeting, tops. Church choir, quit. Clarinet, quit. Piano, well, I WANTED to quit, but by that point my parents were pretty sure they were raising a future deadbeat and so I was force-marched to lessons.

I blame the fact that every group, every organized activity interfered with recess. And if there was one favorite time of day for me, it was recess. I had no interest in athletic activities (had I ever actually begun such a thing I can assure you it would have ended with a major quit). Four square and dodge ball were the banes of my existence, but my friends and I whiled away hours and hours with on-going action-adventure sagas. With a nod to the Little House on the Prairie style of dramatic storytelling, it was one continuous blizzard/scarlet fever outbreak, blizzard/starvation or blizzard/mountain rescue for the better part of first through fourth grade. I had no time for plodding meetings. Besides, if one was late arriving at the recess rendezvous point, one got stuck in the role of the dog.  

As a recent grown-up, I can no longer avoid group activities, but still find myself glancing at the clock as my rear-end goes numb and trying to remember why exactly I signed up for eight hundred million hours in a metal folding chair. I am still not a joiner, so it was with no small measure of trepidation that I committed myself to National Picture Book Writers Week or NaPiBoWriWee, begun three years ago by author Paula Yoo (www.paulayoo.com) as a way to help children's book writers of all levels achieve that most difficult of tasks: beginning. Participants are asked to write seven picture book manuscripts in seven days, and no, it is not that easy to write picture books. These are meant to be horrible, awful, embarrassingly crappy first drafts, not suitable for public consumption, but again, a beginning, words on a blank page, something to build on for the rest of the year. Like so many of my illustrator counterparts, I have many nebulous story ideas rolling around in my brain, several Word folders with quirky titles, a list of concepts for "someday." Could I actually keep my butt in a chair long enough to turn seven of them into stories or would I revert to my organized activity defense mechanism and quit? 

Thanks to daily blog pep talks from Paula, and daily interviews with authors and illustrators and of course the lure of prizes at the end (names drawn from a hat, no actually reading of crappy drafts involved), I did it, and yes, I feel a real sense of accomplishment. I realized that even banging something out in the last hour or two of the day can count, can be something workable. Do I have seven stories with potential? No. Do I have two or three? Yes, absolutely. Am I wishing that I had stuck out Bicentennial Club? Nah. 

The Pink Cupcake-A Mostly True Story

It is the kind of coffee shop you would expect to find in Portland or Seattle. Not a big chain, but a funky converted space, an old maintenance garage in this case, adorned with mid-century modern fixtures and poured concrete floors, what urban hipsters everywhere must imagine heaven's waiting room looks like, complete with heavily tattooed angels bearing espresso and vegan muffins. My artist friend and I meet here occasionally, mainly because if we squint  and talk loud, we can blur out the crush of harried moms and screaming toddlers and pretend we're breathing the rarefied culture-filled air of one of the aforementioned cities, instead of sipping lattes in semi-rural desert suburbia with plans to stop and check the Old Navy clearance rack on the way home.
On this day, it was particularly busy. Maybe it was a school holiday. The place was packed and the line long.With plenty of time to decide which delivery method we wanted for our caffeine fix, we turned to the Plexiglas case of baked goods. The artfully arranged piles of treats looked ready for their Martha Stewart Living cover debut, but one stack of butter/sugar/flour outshone them all. Cupcakes, with thick swirls of pink frosting and a sparkling crust of coarse sugar glinted in the early morning sunshine. Oh, we wanted one, yes indeed, maybe two, maybe two and one for later. Next up to order, poised to plunk down whatever ridiculous amount they were asking per cupcake, I froze mid-sentence as movement caught my eye. There, in the case, taking a leisurely stroll across one of the pink confections was the biggest house fly I had ever seen. Whether you are averse to the saliva a fly coughs up whenever it finds a food source, or just the fact that they land on everything--manure, road kill, public restroom toilet seats--most folks prefer to just say no to fly-pawed food. We were no exception to this. Upon closer inspection we realized that the case had no back, just a sneeze guard, and the restrooms were, in fact, right around the corner. The solemn vow was made right there on the spot to never eat anything from that case, EVER. 
A few moments later, while we sat idly sipping our beverages in the Phoenix sunshine, we saw a young lady with a skip in her step and a pink cupcake shining from its plastic blister box. After a brief debate over the merits of telling her that the black specks were maybe not errant pepper, we decided ignorance was bliss and watched as she broke open her prize, crammed half in her mouth and drove away. We looked at each other, amused and slightly nauseated, and decided that somewhere in there was a truth, a life lesson if you will, only we couldn't settle on which. Sometimes life is a pink cupcake and sometimes it's fly poop? When life gives you a pink cupcake ask where it came from before biting? We never did agree on what to embroider on the pillow, but personally, I think it is always wise, when handed a giant sparkling over-the-top, pink cupcake, to have a good friend who will remind you to scrape the icing off. You still end up with cake.