Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I started a post on December 20th, and here I am finally getting something posted. The holidays are behind us, and although we had a good Christmas and New Year celebrations, it has also been a rough time as we dealt with an ongoing illness with my youngest son. Three trips to the doctor later, we were admitted to Nationwide Children’s Hospital with a diagnosis of pneumonia. We spent the weekend in the hospital watching him slowly improve and we got to come home for New Year’s Eve. He is definitely doing much better now!

As many people do, I have been looking to the new year and wondering what it will have in store, as well as reflecting on 2018. This past year was a great year of firsts for my illustration journey. I began this blog, I started my Instagram account, I got involved with SCBWI and the kidlitart chat community on Twitter, I even travelled to Los Angeles to the SCBWI summer conference! I produced dozens of illustrations throughout the year, made lots of new friends, and felt my confidence in my abilities increase.

In 2019, I plan to get back swing of doing colour collective illustrations at least 2x per month, as well as get a few sample pages for a book dummy complete. My biggest step forward that I’m going to work on is mailing out postcards. For real, guys, postcards are going out this year. With a less definite goal in mind, I’m also going to be giving some use to some Christmas gifts I received: some watercolors and a watercolor sketchbook! I have missed traditional media and look forward to getting familiar with a new medium.

What this means for me is compiling my mailing list! I am going to try to go back to what Giuseppe Castellano suggested: add three names to your list per week. We will see how many I can come up with.

The near year holds a lot of opportunities for us all! What are some attainable goals you have for yourself? Don’t be afraid to dream big!

January 1, 2019 by sarav90 Categories: New Experiences, Personal LifeTags: 2019, art, art directors, children, colour collective, drawing, goals, Guiseppe Castellano, holidays, hospital, illustration, instagram, kidlitart, life, new year, New Years, postcards, resolutions, SCBWI, social media, Summer Conference 2018, twitter 3 Comments

Artist Postcards

Hello, friends! It’s been busy these past few weeks, and I finally have a moment to catch my breath. I just finished laying out a booklet celebrating the work of a Dayton, Ohio-area DJ who has now been in the radio business for 50 years! I volunteer design services for his current radio station on occasion, but this project was the most involved piece I have worked on for them. It is a relief to have it finished!

With my plate slightly more clear for the time being, I can turn my focus back to building my portfolio and preparing for the SCBWI Annual Summer Conference in August. My mini assignments from Guiseppe are coming along nicely. I have 6 art directors on my contact spreadsheet and I have begun to make more changes to the website, beginning with the actual web address. No longer am I encumbered by the WordPress branding! It feels more official this way.

I’ve been giving some thought to postcards lately. Illustrators generally send out postcards showcasing their work to publishers around May and September: the peak hiring times for the year. With the first big round of mailing coming up, my #kidlitart chat friends on Twitter spent last Thursday sharing postcard designs, postcards in process, and asking/answering questions about mailing them out.

I won’t be ready to send out cards in May, but I plan to design my postcards and have them printed by the end of July so I can take them with me to the SCBWI conference in Los Angeles this August. Having them there with me will allow me to hand them out to fellow illustrators with whom I want to keep in contact as well as potential agents, editors, and art directors. Also, since I will have them ready by then, I will plan to send my first mailing in September of this year!

A quick side note about #kidlitart chat: I am so glad to have found these people. The information I have gotten has been very helpful, and they really made me feel welcome from day one. I speak up more now than I did at first, but no one ever made me feel like an outsider. I’m looking forward to meeting some of them face-to-face at the SCBWI conference!

April 25, 2018 by sarav90 Categories: Personal Life, Portfolio ProgressTags: art directors, design, goals, Guiseppe Castellano, illustration, kidlitart, portfolio, postcards, SCBWI, social media, Summer Conference 2018, twitter Leave a comment

Oh So Social!

Hello again, friends!

This past week has felt like a flurry of activity as I did the legwork to get my media presence started. I know I want to stay pretty active on my Instagram and Twitter feeds in order to give people a reason to want to follow me and see what I’ve got going on, so I have started to find some different things to participate in and get myself involved! Here is what I have found so far:

#kidlitart

This hashtag was one I had heard tell of on Shawna JC Tenney’s Stories Unbound podcast. It is used throughout the week on relevant posts by those involved in the children’s literature community: art directors, editors, illustrators, kid lit enthusiasts, etc. They hold a more “organized” discussion once a week on Thursdays at 9pm EST. They announce a general topic for the week’s discussion, but that’s about as organized as it gets.I attended part of the chat this past Thursday (I had a wakeful baby, so I missed part of it), and found that while it was a little challenging to follow the whole thing, there was a lot of useful information being given! I’ll definitely keep tuning in and maybe even say more than just one thing. We’ll see. I’m still just dipping my toe in there.

Even with my limited time in this community, I have already learned new things, found new people to follow, and even gained a couple of followers myself! I may not have as much experience as some of these people, but everyone has been very welcoming and I look forward to getting more deeply rooted here.

Colour Collective

This is a weekly challenge I came across on Twitter. I noticed one of the posters in the #kidlitart chat had this hashtag recurring in many of her pieces she posted on her account, so I did some searching and found there was a twitter account with this name that asks you to create an art piece using their selected color of the week. They post the color for the coming week each Saturday and ask that you post your finished piece on Friday at 19:30 GMT (7:30pm EST, my time).

This week’s color is Laurel Green. I finished my piece already, so I’m wondering if I should put more detail into it or if I should try to crank out another piece for the week. Or do I just leave it alone and put my efforts towards the other challenge:

#BAPC18

I found this on the kidlitart blog, and it couldn’t have come at a better time! Starting with this past February and running through July, they announce a prompt each month to create a piece to add to your illustration portfolio. It encourages you to get out of your comfort zones and push yourself. What excellent timing that I would find this just one month into the challenge as I’m trying to build my portfolio and I’m not sure what to make!

This month’s challenge is to draw a crowd scene showing a range of diverse characters, ages, and races. I didn’t vary the races as much as maybe some people will, but it made sense to do it that way for the scene I decided to make. I’m going to be starting to post some previews of the coming piece on Instagram and Twitter here soon. One may already be there by the time you see this!

What prompts do you follow to keep yourself creating? What communities are you a part of that help you grow and support you? I’d love to hear from you!

March 20, 2018 by sarav90 Categories: New ExperiencesTags: bapc18, challenge, colour collective, illustration, instagram, kidlitart, portfolio, social media, Stories Unbound, twitter Leave a comment