News from the front

Well the SCWBI winter conference has now been and gone.

After surviving snowboarding(although my watch did not) and leaving the hospitality of Cam's friend Dave and his family behind we got the plane to New York which was far far better than the flight to america- I even began to get into a groove of drawing which was good.

Once in New York - I/we stayed at Yanni and Kikki's-(friends of Cam also)- they have an apartment in Tribeca on Chambers St which is quite something to behold.

The illustrators intensive at the conference was sort of a mixed bag for me. The first speaker was Paul Zelinsky. Some of the books he'd done were quite labor intensive-( ie a kids book done in oil renaissance painting style) which left me wondering-
a:how much time he had to do them- and
b: just how much he was being paid?

That is,
clearly he wasn't spending half a day to 3/4 maximum per page(rough+cleanup+colour=total) but probably in the order of weeks per page(?).
Also I sort of had the feeling his education , training, and upbringing was a world away from me like I was looking into an expensive shop- ie him being educated at Yale or somesuch and me being largely self taught. I think he derived a lot of inspiration from paintings and fine art, which is good I guess in terms of using those styles to evoke some sort of association, but on the other hand I think it is most important to work things out from first principles and from the ideas and not rely on second or third hand information.

I sort of decided to start drawing while

I listened- the top left hand version of him is closest likeness although a caricature.

Next speaker was Lisa Desimini. Hers is a naive or folk art style-in some instances a bit Rousseau like utilitising photo textures(- so not very much like my style at all).
Her part of the workshop was the one I'd done the Snow White homework for (previously posted- I'd actually done a few other ideas that night in raw form but there were three I'd sort of finished as black and white.)
In the showing of our homework I was sort of pleased because I sussed out other peoples work and felt my work stood out pretty well.
Then she asked us to, in 15 minutes , take your idea and modify it to show what it might be like if the evil queen showed up on the scene- so I picked the forest scene as easiest to extrapolate and did this in 15 min.

Although afterwards it seems what she meant was a complete reimagining the whole image, perhaps using a sort of word association technique I 'd read before-

I think in a book on writing for animation fro example, however I tend to parallel that sort of thing in my own way- and I don't think generating ideas is a problem for me. Ah well.... I liked what I'd done of the cuff anyway.

By this time also I'd managed to locate Sarah Davis- so at least there was a solidarity of 2 Australians in that room however brief.

*have to go to bed briefly to catch the plane home in 5 hrs- I'll finish detailing the rest of my impressions and speaker doodlings between flights I guess- in the meantime- uptop are two images I did on the last day today while listening to the talks, and an initial couple of some of the other speakers which I'll explain later.*

I will say the guy above , called Peter Sis, depicted in a pirate hat and also with wings(because he kept making flapping hand gestures) was very funny and reminded me in his humour of none other than

Milenko- and though their art is very different visually I think Milenko puts a similar amount of thoughtful detail in his pictures.