head down and workin'

Not much to report around here, but I thought I'd check in anyway. My manuscript rewrite has been approved; Surfside Girls is lean and mean (and literally, you can check the SSG website, Sam has just blogged about how a surfer girl stays in shape.) Now I'm rebuilding a dummy, and I'm on page 45. Once I feel good about this flow, I'll start painting. I want the dummy to be tight, though. I'm going to try a new thing- popping my paper off my watercolor block and working over the dummy on the light table. Hopefully this will save some time as I'll have about 70 pages to paint before we send this out for some one to fall in love with and publish.

To shake it up, I made Sam in Spring paper dolls, and have all the seasons drawn out and ready to paint. I get the urge to noodle, and that need is not fulfilled by arranging and rearranging a dummy book. If you want some paper dolls of your own, you can download them for free off the Surfside Girls website. Look at me, learning to use the technology!

Did I mention a couple of posts ago how I singlehandedly saved the pelicans from the Endangered Species List? To reinforce their point, they nearly blocked out the sun on Easter! Well, not literally. But Ethan and I always make a point to count how many pelicans are flying in a line or a V formation; the most we've ever seen is about 20. We were driving home along PCH on Easter afternoon, coming from a lovely day spent in the tidepools in Laguna, when we saw a line- no kidding- over a hundred long. Ridiculous! They were headed to the Bolsa Chica wetlands. I had my phone out the window, trying to capture this. At stoplights I noticed other people doing the same. This many pelicans is simply unheard of! But awesome. And I am giving myself full credit, as their endangered status was a major plot point in an earlier draft of the book, and Murphy and his Law just looks for situations like that to exploit!

The only other (art) thing I have going is that I have agreed to paint a mural in my son's elementary school cafeteria as the 5th Grade Gift. I'm kind of excited; at first, I was miserable as I found out that in order to be on the necessary scaffolding, I had to do this after school hours. And in order to do that, the PTA had to hire a district employee at time-and-a-half to supervise me and make sure I didn't fall or perhaps use an offensive shade of green. The PTA would not have been able to afford this, so I offered to do it off-site (at home) on doorskin plywood, cut to shape! I'll post sketches next week.