It's Time to Fly

As mentioned here and there over the past year, I have been working on a picture book. My first. It has been a challenge getting these reluctant birds off the ground, but in recent weeks I have made good progress. And hey! I'm excited that the story is, at long last, coming together.



Storyboarding the manuscript has proven more thought-consuming task than I had previously imagined. Where to start a sentence? Where to end it? What happens on the next page? And the next? Where in the story do the page breaks belong? How do I keep my reader turning and turning to find out what happens next? And more importantly: How do I fill an entire book with the same herons and still keep it interesting, different from spread to spread?



I'm not sure I have all the right answers to that right now. I must remind myself that these are thumbnail sketches, not finished masterpieces. It is tempting to go into feather-by-feather detail with each little 2-inch-high drawing. I tend to get lost in minutiae. When I do I must catch myself and force myself to step back into the big picture. A wider, less meticulous marker has come in handy.



This book has become somewhat of a "Kate Garchinsky's Opus." I first observed these lanky, prehistoric-looking birds over the summers of 2000-2004 at my ex-husbands's family's house in Avalon, New Jersey. Yellow-crowned night herons nested right outside the bedroom windows. I took hundreds of photos with my old-school SLR. I watched and observed several broods hatch, grow and fledge. I wrote the first draft one day in July 2005, shortly before moving to Colorado. It was, at the time, symbolic of the unknown journey that lay before me.



When I arrived in Colorado, the mountains quickly became part of me, and I grew distant from the herons of Avalon--but they never left my mind. As my life here changed, so did my marriage. Eventually I found myself out on my own in the land of snow and pine siskins. I had bought a new computer around that time and during the migration of data from one hard drive to the other, I stumbled an unfamiliar Word document, "Time to fly.doc." I hadn't read it in 3 years and until I opened it, had no idea what it was. The story found me exactly when I needed it.



Rereading a year ago, the words had new meaning. When I had written it I was learning to fly away from my birth nest of Pennsylvania. Three years later I was in the process of leaving the nest of my mate. And now a year has past and my life requires that I fly once more. Spring migration has begun. While my current nest has offered comfort and respite through storms and blizzards, I know that it is time. I've come full circle, and it is time once again to fly.



While I prepare for my next journey, I'll post whatever progress I make here. My goal is to have all storyboards and at least one finished watercolor illustration complete for submission before I take wing.

Illustration Friday: Communication

As usual, it's been a while since I contributed to Illustration Friday. As usual, I do not have time to paint something new. But I do have something in my archives that suits the topic, and that is not against the rules. This illustration is one of four I completed for a book called "Chanda's House" by Katrina Martin Davenport. Sometime after completing the first four Katrina and I decided to pull the title from the publisher that was planning to publish it. Long story short, it was not a mutually beneficial arrangement. I have hope that someday this story will find its' publisher.

The illustration depicts a scene where the main character, Katrina, has a talk with her mother about differences in culture. Specifically, Katrina has a friend, Chanda, who is Indian and after a scary first experience, Katrina is apprehensive about going to play at Chanda's house again. Katrina expresses her fears and her mother assures her that experiencing different cultures can be an adventure, which makes it all a lot less scary.

I haven't painted any children's illos in a long time. Not since this series in 2005. It's on my list of to-do's. Along with painting landscape masterpieces and becoming an expert skier. One thing at a time.

I'll be uploading some new pictures of Butters and Maggie to my flickr page soon. Butters is almost as big as Maggie!

Happy Friday.