Yoda's wisdom

On a day like today when it is gray and summer has not come to the Pacific Northwet yet, I attempt to find some words of wisdom to get me off my butt to write or draw. 

Today's find might work:

“Do or do not... there is no try.” -Yoda

Weaving my website..

I finally, finally got my first few website pages up. Doing html and cascading style sheets is much harder than it looks. Dreamweaver is great but there is all is code stuff that is very unforgiving, only one capital letter in a file name can cause something not to load. Yikes. And don't get me started on "AP div tags."

I wish they would make a web program where an illustrator can just use a stylus pen and draw what they want and presto, you have a website. It could be called "DrawWeaver!"

But I did it and I did it my way with lots of emails back and forth to my web host. I'll be adding more content and more portfolio pictures and debugging (can't I just spray some Raid?)  but if you are curious about my home grown website check out my progress at "www.cedarmoonstudio.com" and tell me what you think. Don't worry, I belong to a critique group and am married to an editor...I can take the criticism.

Appreciating Summer...

I just read Arthur A. Levine's new blog at http://arthuralevine.wordpress.com, he's fairly new the blogging world but not to the children's publishing world (he's the American editor of the Harry Potter books). His own picture book is coming out soon, I can't wait to see it.

His long nostalgic blog made me realize that I have slumped in my blogging. There are too many excuses as to why but I am inspired. Arthur's blog is about appreciating summer so I thought about it and decided to share my appreciation with you.

I’m appreciating the anticipation of summer. The deck of our 65 year old cottage sits eighty feet above the Puget Sound near Seattle and it’s been raining and raining and raining. The slugs are conferencing in my garden and every seed we planted has molded.

But when the sun comes out, everything looks new and dressed in a thousand shades of green and I go out on the deck and fill my lungs with warm sea air and my mind with sunny thoughts and I remember that without the rain, you can’t have a rain forest. It might even get up to 60 degrees today – time to put away the fleece vest! Yeah summer!

What do you appreciate about the summer?

Cheap Thrills...

My husband and I started calling the small things that delight us "cheap thrills". A blog I read by Kirby Larson mentioning riches beyond imagination. Her blog note made me remember when we would find these "cheap thrills" daily. Then kids and mortgages and life kind of buried the simple ritual of naming the cheap thrill when we saw it.

My favorite riches from the sea are a perfect Moonsnail shell or 'sea china", blue and white pieces of old china plates polished into satin jewels. Some of my cheap thrills include watching cream swirl in fresh coffee, standing in sunshine in the rain with your face to the sun and a rainbow to your back and finding a PURPLE sea star. Of course my favorite is a sleeping kitten in the warm fresh laundry basket.

Today's project during my 'drawing time' will be to draw a few old "cheap thrills". Be sure to treasure yours.

Judging a Book by it's Cover

I recently read a blog controversy about book covers matching the content of the book. I wrote a response and promised to post the cover on my blog.
The cover was for a book about "Leadership and Performance Management in Government" for accountants. The request was for something 'modern' but not too 'edgy'. It was an interesting challenge.
Sometimes it is tough to produce a cover without some knowledge of the content. Umm, I have been known to balance my checkbook by using the ATM and checking the remaining balance.
I read the introduction to the book and the letters back and forth to the client. I did a little research on the client's website  and came up with this cover. I opted to illustrate 'balance', it seems very appropriate for accountants.
(I left the printers marks because I thought you might like to see what it looks like before it gets printed. Click to see a larger size.)
The outside of a book is as important as the inside. It entices the reader to open the book.

I’m all ablog with IDEAS, but...

...apparently I can’t keep up.

My New Year’s Resolutions went out with the tide, flushed away in the things I need to do and want to do. I resolved to eat better not more – 'more' won out at my husband’s birthday party. I resolved to watch my weight…I watched it go up this week. I resolved to communicate with those I have lost connection with…I lost their email addresses. I resolved to finally get my website up. It still sits in all it’s glory…on my computer waiting for a hall pass to the Internet. I vowed to query, I'm still researching.

I resolved to put away my boxes of Christmas stuff before mid-January. (Cedar, my Maine Coon kitten-cat, helped sort them). The boxes are still sitting on the deck in a Pacific Northwest monsoon waiting to be re-deposited in my under house crawl space – currently inhabited by a ghost rat who leaves corporeal evidence of his hauntings.

I vowed to keep up my blog. I didn’t. So much for resolution #6. Tomorrow is another day. Is anyone reading this anyway?

Here's to 2010...

Happy New Year, New Decade, New Month, New Day! Here are some wonderful New Year wishes from writer Neil Gaiman:

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope it’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself."
Neil Gaiman’s website

Ditto from me, I couldn't have said it better!

"I have an idea!"

I just counted my PiBoIdMo ideas. I thought I had about 35 ideas. I don't normally pay much attention to numbers or math unless I have to or unless I need to calculate something out of the ordinary like parsecs or parallax...but that's another story, I digress. My idea count now stands at 76.
Wow, I've surprised myself.