At work, I started a sketch of John Frusciante on my yellow notepad. I took it home and finished it as I listened to his studio albums (minus "...Usually Just a T-Shirt") on random. I sat Adan next to me with a few markers and a doodle pad and he made his own drawings of a "car" (scribbles) and of an "opicus" (scribbles that he said was an octopus). 

I fell in love with John's music in 2006, after falling deeply in love with The Red Hot Chili Peppers' album "Stadium Arcadium" on an August day, during a long drive home from the sun-drenched dirt of Arizona. That dark winter, I discovered "To Record Only Water for Ten Days", one of John's solo albums. It was a discovery that transformed me in an artistic powerhouse, and confused my hypersensitive heart, for I had discovered that it wasn't the Chili Peppers and Anthony Kiedis's dodgy lyrics that had captured me, but it was John. It was all John. 

From that moment on I worked on collecting all of John's music that I could. The wailing guitars and siren, gruff  voice seemed to personify what I felt, and define in music who I was. The harmonies would sometimes bring me to tears. His vocal relationship to Josh Klinghoffer on songs like "Omission" with make my chest swell. 

Lately, John has been pulling me in again. I felt anxious and desperate because I had to back up my computer in the cloud and re-install the operating system and have a tech go through and clean out the hard drive. I had to live without music for a few days. I had to live without John.

The depressing part is that I have floor seats to a Chili Peppers concert in August. John will not be there. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to experience John live, and in person. Ever. 

"When You Can't Function, Someone Decides Who You Are."

Tell me about it, John.

On Monday I picked up my illustrations, along with stitched-together scans for Adan's book.

Digital Pickle's Yelp profile doesn't do it justice. Apparently a bad manager ran the Pasadena location into the ground. But their new staff is doing an excellent job, in my opinion. The scans look great and my illustrations were returned to me in better shape than I brought them in; I received my art back wrapped in plastic and in a sturdy paper bag with my name written on it in silver ink!

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that our home computer isn't up to task for digital production. I first started noticing the issue when I put Adobe Flash onto the system. The program freezes and dies often and takes almost 10 minutes to load. When I tried to upload the high resolution TIF files from Digital Pickle, my computer had a brain fart and keeled over.

So, after spending an entire day of uploading the files to a cloud server from my work computer, I spent most of my evening downloading said files onto my home computer.

It's been a hurdle every step of the way, but we're getting there!

Done

Last weekend I worked on another page of my book for Adan.

And suddenly it was done. Like, the entire book.

I was very surprised, since this is something that I've been working on for close to two years. The completion sneaked up. The entire experience has me inspired to complete other "large" projects.

Now all I need to do is scan the illustrations and format the book.

Wow.

And here is an "on hold" sketch I had laying around here of Adan.

Over the summer I took a trip to northern California for a friend's wedding. Adan, my husband, and I stayed with my parents for the short visit. One afternoon my mother mentioned to me a stack of papers that had been under the bed in my old room, that a family friend had brought them over to give to me, and asked if I had wanted them. This was about the sixth time she had asked me, and every time I told her to just give it away to the elementary school down the street. It had been customary since my birth, practically, to give me paper and often times the paper was of poor quality. So, I wasn't jumping at the chance to even look at it.

"The print shop [where our family friend works] is no longer using that type of paper," my mother began. At the word "print shop" I got up from my seat and followed my mother to the box. "So [our friend] brought it over to us because she thought you would like it."

We dusted off the top of the huge flat box and lifted the lid.

It was like opening a treasure chest: high quality, toothy, beautiful, thick paper.

Sorry, elementary school. This paper is mine.



Unfortunately, I decided to take on the illustrations in watercolor and didn't consider the warping water would cause to the paper. It's minimal, though, and shouldn't affect the final look too much, especially after I scan the pages.

Slowly I'm getting this done. But it will get done.

I finally finished the final text. I'm buckling down for the next few days to try and knock out a few pages.



A friend of mine sold a movie script to Warner Brothers. It's insane what a person can do with their talent if one works hard enough. He told an interviewer that he obviously put in his two weeks at his current job.

My body hurts. I wake up in the middle of the night with my joints throbbing.

I don't want to be doing my day job for the rest of my life.

Newborns

I've been away too long.

If I'm not working my day-job, or doing free-lance work for the multimedia start-up I work with, I'm with Adan. In terms of furthering the "Adan the Tiger" project, this had been a world of good and hurt.

I read to Adan every day. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?" And the most insane discovery of all is that his favorite book: a $1 board book I bought from Target entitled "Little Chick". (See the book here) This book is so simple, contains only 5 pages, and Adan goes bonkers whenever I bring it out to read to him. His next favorite is "Brown Bear..."

I wasn't happy with the last version of my story because it became too involved. I was over-thinking the entire thing. And as I read to Adan and see repetition in sounds or images is key, the more I get excited about reworking the book yet again.

Maybe "Adan Goes to Sleep!" would be appropriate!

Tonight I whipped up a rough draft for the story part of the book.

It was interesting for me to have spent the latter half of my 27 years on this earth trying to over-think and be analytical about everything, and then to have to suddenly simplify my thoughts for a pre-school age audience. I was trying to make the book subtly educational, but continued to reach the point where the simplicity couldn't be maintained.

For example, Adan the Tiger meets a turtle. On several of the first drafts, I was cemented in the idea that Adan would somehow discover how long turtles were expected to live. But in every draft of the story, the way in which Adan had to find out such facts exceeded the acceptable amount of time for even an adult to pay attention.

I went from an elaborate storyline where Adan's discoveries rivaled those of marine biology graduate students, to combining basic colors and numbers into his adventure. Even then the simple beginning and end of the story of a lost tiger cub seems frayed, open-ended, and unbelievable. How is it that I'm going to write a book about a talking tiger, but I can't get over the fact that he learns about colors and numbers while lost in the jungle?

I suppose today's brain-wrenching activity was just the first of many as I embark on my journey into motherhood.

My hiatus from this blog came quickly, I know.

I recently recovered from an illustration gig with a start-up multimedia company. The job would potentially pay, but the fact that the process itself would bulk up my portfolio was compensation enough if the contracts and talk fell through. The alternative family children's book consisted of twenty-two pages and, while colored in Adobe PhotoShop 7, was hand drawn and inked with three different Micron Archival Pens.

The job took what I saw as a devastating blow when the producer overlooked available printing dimensions and my full-page, 10"x8" color images (some meant to span over a 2-page spread) had to be shrunk to fit onto an 8"x"10" book print. I was obviously frustrated considering that the producers had worked on a pretty nice book prior to the current series and I had made the assumption that they had already looked into the printing options with Amazon's CreateSpace. Luckily for us, there will be other books in the series and I can work with the correct dimensions from the start. But in the meantime the premier book is set up to be presented in a less-than-flattering light.

The actual, human Adan can come any second now. Because of maternity leave, my time has become abundant and I've been spending it working on Adan the Tiger-related writing and drawing.



If you or anyone else is looking for something similar to this for friends or family (think of the babies!) then you can make your way over to my Etsy Shop!

Letter of Intent

Around month 6 of my pregnancy with my first child, Adan Julian, I decided that I wanted to write a children's book for him. What better way to jump-start my art life again than to create a gift especially for Adan and Adan only. Books are something that most children have, but very few have ones specifically written about themselves; few have the excitement of opening a book past the title page and reading "For my son, Adan."

As a young child, long before my interests spilled from simple images into the words of authors like Roald Dahl, my favorite books were anything Suess, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Corduroy. Colorful and creative, vast picture books printed on glossy big pages, with simple stories and memorable characters sandwiched between library-laminated hardcovers. As I grew older I often fashioned most of my school projects into books I had written and illustrated. Some involved animal detectives, some parodied my favorite cartoon as a youth, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I finished each one. ...and have not been able to complete such a project since I was around 9 years old.

I'll be 27 in January and if my son decides to be born a few weeks early, he will be born on my birthday. I'm certain that a book cannot be completed in that amount of time and be as breath-taking as I like, but the idea of completing a project in time for him to sit-up and stare and drool at my drawings. 18 years is entirely too long to be finishing things that I start.

The synopsis is simple: Adan is a tiger (my husband's favorite animal) who asks a lot of questions and goes exploring to find lots of answers. Along the way he meets a handful of animal friends that he learns from. At the end he reports back to his parents all of the fun things he's learned.