I find myself creatively stuck almost every, every book that I’ve done and I — for instance this past week I was working on a book and I thought this one is really going to be breeze to finish. I’ve got all the preliminary work done, all my preliminary sketches, I know what I’m doing and again because I kind of got off on the wrong foot, and just started hating everything that I was doing and as soon as that happens I start to second guess myself and I think I’ve got the wrong paper, I think I’m using the wrong paint and it took eight days of every day finishing the day with a lot of confusion as to why this was not working out when I thought it was going to be so straight forward.
And then I finally did have I think a breakthrough so that I know what I’m doing. I never know quite what I’m doing but I’m excited to keep working and if, if it’s — if I’m not enjoying it, if I’m not happy when I’m working generally the end product is pretty awful. And I — that’s something that I have remind myself as well.
I’m conscious when I have, when I have found my way finally. I — there — I generally do know when it’s, when I’m there. For instance with my book A Ball for Daisy that went through many iterations and toward the end of the process I did the entire book, the full final artwork and I was feeling, I was feeling pretty good about it.
But not entirely happy and I turned it in and my editor Anne Schwartz and the art director Lee Wade had to write me the painful editor — the painful letter that said it’s not working. It’s just, it’s, it’s just not there yet and I agreed with them once that arrived.
And partly I was trying to paint everything in negative space that is painting in broad brush strokes around the object in question which was my little dog. And so you would only — sometimes only half of her would be defined, seems like a silly idea now when I think about it and they were right to turn me down.
I liked that look, I had done some early sketches and it seemed to work and then — but to really get this dog moving through her neighborhood and space in this technique didn’t work. The final version A Ball for Daisy has — still has aspects of that because she’s still defined by kind of a loose gray brush stroke and where the brush strokes is her and where is the background isn’t always clear but the dog herself did become clear in the final version. So this is the kind of thing that I get myself into.
Yes, Daisy also was sequential and wordless, the original Daisy book was just single images on — that went across the entire spread of each book so the entire — of each two pages. So in total the book probably had 17 or 18 different images, now the book has more because some of the sequential panels fit onto one two page spread. So it allowed a little more time to take place within the book, a little more detail of time, and that is a fascinating thing to work with it being wordless, how the time progresses, how you control the amount of time each spread takes up.
