Collage of Memories

My mom, aka Burl to her left coast kin, was an energetic and creative soul. Burl tried so many different crafts during her retirement years that I started calling her creations “Burl’s Limited Editions: sometimes limited to one.” Learning a new craft, enjoying the process, and then moving on to another new craft were what…

Spacing out in our space

A friend asked his artist friends to share photos of their work spaces for a presentation he was working on. When I sent him mine, his comment was, “I love ugly offices.” That’s what I have. My office is situated in a dilapidated mobile home across the road from my house. We call the old…

Old dog keeps on trying new tricks

African Elephant I’m still messing about with collage and the computer. This time I wanted the line drawing (that I create with a real pencil and piece of paper) to look like a block print. Well, it looks more like stained glass, but that’s okay. I used the “cut-out” feature in Photoshop to get the…

“If you can’t do everything brilliantly, at least you should have a bash.”

This week, Kids Discover posted my blog post about the possible perils of labeling a child the “class artist.” Here’s the link that explains why that might be a bad idea. The author Neil Gaiman was interviewed on NPR this morning. He stated, “You have all these amazing tools; it’s up to you what kinds…

Back to Work.

This is another collage for the nonfiction book I’ve been working on. The verse is omitted since I hope to sell the idea at some point, but this critter and the setting worked well as a subject for collage. I hope that the publisher hires me to illustrate it if it sells! But honestly, that…

Switching Gears

I had a week after the school visit to catch up on things, so I used some of the time to keep messing with computer collage, gleefully recalling that this time last year I was stressing out over the annual SCBWI Spring Conference. Retirement is good. Here’s the latest version of the collage I was…