This last two weeks have been full of exciting treats ,late nights, sticky fingers and potentially stressful moments but I have survived. I hope your week has been good to you also.

Aside from drawing dinosaurs and thinking about stories that are blossoming in my head I have been to a dinner to hear Jackie French, celebrated my sons twentieth birthday (don’t feel old enough), helped install my laundry and attended a reunion dinner.

 Reunions can be filled with problems and anxieties but this one was wonderful and we have all vowed to meet up again on an annual basis. A lovely bunch of women I have known since our kids were tiny babies. We all sat and caught up on our twenty plus year olds, two had become grandparents and many had in-laws added to the family group. Once upon a time we had all spent many hours talking to mums on the phone as ABA (Nursing Mothers) counsellors. We all share a passion and it was a delight to see the photos as they were handed around the table.

About 15 years ago, at a Nursing Mothers Meeting we were all asked to write down what we would like to be doing in ten years time. I wrote down that I had always wanted to be a children’s picture book illustrator and that was a goal  I was going to aim for. We were encouraged to pursue those goals and dreams. So here I am, pursuing the dream and I achieved it.  Thankyou NMAA for your encouragement and philosophy of empowerment.

Over dinner much was discussed, a lot of catching up had to be done. A lot of us had kids who were studying or working in creative fields, in fact my son and the daughter of a friend are both studying music at the Con’ in Hobart this year and have become good friends. One mum said with exasperation that her son, now in senior secondary, was interested in performance and set design. Her exasperation wasn’t that he wanted to do this with great passion but that his father had said that amongst these creative subjects he was choosing to study, he also had to do some ‘real’ subjects. My heart sunk. As an art teacher I am well familiar with this take on the arts. Pick the art  teacher - the only teacher with an empty date card on parent /teacher night! Kids often said to me that they wanted to study art but their parents wouldn’t let them as they needed to do ‘serious’ subjects. Art wasn’t important!

What era are we living in?

I know that most of you who take time to read the blog of a professional artist/author/illustrator are the converted, so I won’t bore you with a soap box stand but I encourage you to pass on these sentiments to anyone you hear declaring the arts as not being ‘a real job’.

Next time you watch TV, it wouldn’t be there without movie makers, designers, actors, presenters, artists, writers, musicians and many more.

Next time you read a book, writers, graphic designers, publicists, printers, illustrators etc.

Next time you go to the supermarket consider how things would look without designers and graphics, could you find your favourite chocolate bar?

Next time you go to the movies, the theatre, read a newspaper or magazine, pick up your phone, use an app, admire your pretty toilet paper, go to bed in attractive bed linen, drive your car, sit on your couch, eat at a table, snuggle with a cushion, put on your clothes, shampoo your hair, the list is endless.

So, as I work hard at my real job (which by the way has actually paid a wage this financial year, small but growing) and appreciate the benefits it brings, including the joy of following my dream and

fulfilling my passion which is quite different to chasing the dollar signs, I feel sad for people who don’t realise that being creative is perhaps the hardest but most rewarding of ‘real’ jobs there is.

I’ve had a few jobs in my life but this is the most ‘real’ and ‘alive’ I have ever been in any one of them. Because I am using my gifts and talents I am content and know that I can bring joy to others as well.

Lets encourage our kids to follow their passions and discover their true ‘real’ jobs.

Happy writing

'The Carrum Sailing Club' by Claire Saxby Christina Booth. In stores now.

The other day my brother-in-law said to us that LIFE is a four letter word. It tickled my fancy at first but then I thought about it and was a little sad that something so full of beautiful things and people and blessings that abound us can be reduced to the same level as a swear word. Words are such powerful things, writers know that best of all and I have decided not to categorise life into the swear word basket.

Life is busy. We cram it so full of things. This month has seen Children’s Book Week in Australia and that for me is busier than Christmas (certainly helps put the craziness of December in perspective). I stayed home for book week this year, at least in Tassie. I thought it would be a quieter week but because I still had domestic stuff to deal with (interstate guests, a 60th wedding anniversary, kids and a husband who thoughtfully planned his holidays to coincide with book week, love you Michael) so it was somewhat exhausting. I love book week so the exhaustion is worth it.

And what of my day job? Well, this book (the dinosaurs) has taken a sharp turn. I have done something I have never done before (Cristina, my publisher from Windy Hollow Books, please don’t read this bit….).

I STARTED OVER! Phew, I said it. Doing it was a tough thing to do, I put it off, I fiddle faddled around until I spoke stern words to myself and just did it. I made a mistake of starting two new things in the one book and thus the learning curve became too steep. Lesson learned. I am a perfectionist, I won’t let these illustrations go until I am happy they are the best I can do. I also have an expectation that each time I do a book it must get better than those that have gone before, the art process is one of constant learning and development. My perfectionist attitude has caused me some problems in the past but this time it has paid off! (Cristina, you are now allowed to read again).

I usually draw up and then complete an illustration before moving on to the next. I don’t work in sequence as this ensures that the development that naturally occurs in a succession of related art works isn’t obvious but appears balanced and even throughout the book. The dinosaurs looked great, the little boy was ok but I wasn’t happy. I was trying to simplify the images down too much yet include too much information. Then I painted them with the beautiful ink (new medium #1) on the dark pastel paper (new medium #2) and constantly overworked it until I had muddy, dull dinosaurs and a lifeless little boy. I had to walk away and consider the inevitable, 6 months into the book I must start again. I have never done this before. Blah!

So, I sat and considered what I should do to change the fate of this book. I decided that my strength as an artist has always been my drawing skill. I am good with pencil and this is an aspect that was shining through on my roughs for the book. The dinosaurs looked great and the boy did as well. So I sat, with my newly purchased pile of replacement pastel paper and began. I freely drew in the images, leaving in my working lines, removing only a few excess pencil marks and then did my outlines in heavier pencil, created my tone and texture with the pencil and whala! It worked and looked great. Hubby returned from work to find me hunched over my desk excitedly producing pages, he cooked tea and I worked until my eyes began to fail me. I had in a few hours overtaken the point I had reached previously. I had made a few adaptions to the boy character and to a couple of pages that seemed repetitive. I HAD FOUND MY MOJO!

I am so excited about this book. Usually, the truth be told, I get part way through a book I am illustrating for someone else and begin to long to do my own work, but this time I am so excited about the illustrations and how they are working I am considering writing my own dinosaur book just so I can draw them again! Paint hasn’t hit the paper yet as this time I am drawing all the pages up first, then I will carefully wash the colours in over the top, gently and freely to avoid the muddiness that occurred before. I can’t wait. I love colour.

So, sadly for you all you will have to wait until it is done, but I can give you a little sneak peek.

LIFE isn’t a four letter word, it is a word that happens around us constantly. Sometimes it overwhelms us and other times it wraps around us and reminds us of how wonderful it is. Without dark the light would mean nothing. As I sit here and write the blog that I have frustratedly been unable to get to for near a month, I am reminded about how beautiful life is. I sit and watch a wallaby with her joey emerging from her pouch, nibble leaves through the window in front of me, I listen to two beautiful thrush birds call constantly to each other as spring begins to awaken the garden. Life isn’t too fast, we are. I am so blessed to live in such beautiful surroundings with such inspiration.

Even the dinosaurs seem to know spring is on the way.

Happy writing, reading and enjoying LIFE.

sneek peek sketch for Dinosaur book, 2011wallaby with joey in my front garden

Spoiler: I Wish There Were Dinosaurs by Amanda Niland

Uh oh, its July. Where did that come from?

Finally the kids are at school and the house is mine, well, almost. One sleeping husband, dare not wake him. He’s meant to be at work but he is recovering from a night of numerous call outs (enthusiastic surgeons to blame). He will have a late start.

Anyway, it means that the noisy housework has to wait and now I have no excuses about heading to the studio and getting on with some work. Funny how I can manage to put it off. It isn’t a horrible job, I just love it but until I get there it seems so hard to get my head around it sometimes.

This week my oldest son, 19, has flown off to Queensland for the National Australian Music Educators Conference. His first major conference and his first solo flight. He is there as Tasmania’s Young Composer, selected to represent his state and to attend workshops with a composer in residence on the Gold Coast. Lucky him, it’s hailing here and freezing.

I am very proud of him, as any Mum would be. He rang earlier and I asked how his concert had gone,  the Gold coast Philharmonic Orchestra had played his and the other representatives compositions last night in a public concert. Sadly, he is the only young composer without family attending to hear the work but he is also the oldest rep and we were just unable to go.  I get to hear a recording soon, I hope. We had a discussion about how it is often disappointing how others interpret your work  (not that his went badly). We discussed the processes and levels involved in creating an art work and how, to the creator, the process itself is a complete experience on its own, regardless of the finished product that others may get to indulge in.  He composes for its pure pleasure. I draw and paint also for the indulgent sensation it gives me, something that the viewer will never experience or often be aware of.

Today I am painting giraffes and dinosaurs, the front cover of a new book written by Amanda Niland. I’m having fun. I am using a new medium, well, I have used it for drawing but not for painting. The wonderful intense colour of ink and the lovely transparent layers it creates over the grey

pastel paper I have chosen for this project, something new again.

It is perhaps like taking a drug. The sensations it creates are not necessarily physical but I don’t know any other way to describe them. Watching what happens as you overlay, blend, and dab away, having an idea in your head what you want to have happen and seeing the picture take on a life of its own. It is like having a high but a sensible one. It is quite amazing. Often you think you are failing but then, just one more line, colour or tone brings it into a place that makes it leap from the page and that wonderful sensation returns.

With this book, I am venturing into a brave new world. I love texture and colour and so using ink on pastel paper has thrown me out of my comfort zone. I always like to put a lot of effort into my roughs, allowing them to evolve and be changed but keeping them as finished as possible and then transferring them using a light box to the watercolour paper I usually use. To throw a spanner in the works I never considered the lack of transparency of the paper I have chosen, it is grey and textured so the light box doesn’t work. I have decided to re-draw the images directly onto the page, allowing them to continue to grow and change as I move through the book.

So, like my musician son, I get a total buzz out of my creations. I get a decent sense of satisfaction when the finished book arrives and seeing the whole ‘product’ come together but  this process of bringing it to life with images, light and colour is the best. I wish I could bottle it and share it with you…

So, I write my blog today while waiting for the paint  ink to dry. The excuse that the kids always gave in art class for not getting on with their work. But even the drying process is a thrill, as each layer is applied it brings with it new textures and depth of colour, often unpredicted, that can only been seen once the impatient time of waiting occurs.

So, until next time, enjoy waiting for your paint to dry…..

Christina

Last night, after many sittings, I finished Thyla, by my wonderful and clever friend, Kate Gordon. To be very honest, Thyla isn’t the sort of book I usually read, not a quality thing, just a taste thing. Thyla is a paranormal young adult book, one that I know will appeal to that age group. It is well written and doesn’t hang off every bit of teenage angst that exists, it is about a wonderful character called Tessa who is finding out who she is,  not in the self-awareness and discovery way of 16-year-old girls, she actually  has amnesia! But the other discovery bit is in there as well. I enjoyed it. Whilst it is a fantasy world (unless there is something Kate hasn’t told us!) it is still real. Real enough for you to connect with and relate to the characters, to picture them and  begin to know them. And I was totally spoilt, even though the protagonist, Tessa isn’t Kate, it is Kate’s voice I could hear reading me the story, her gentle voice inside my head. A bonus of being friends with the author I suppose, a real gift I hadn’t experienced before.

Now, I have to start a new book. Do I choose the romance I had given to me for my birthday (I’m not a really a romance fan either but then, I have read a few I like and this one is highly recommended by the lovely giver), a novel set in Africa, the series my daughter just loves (The Phoenix Files by Chris Morphew) or the birthday present from my kids, a biography about Roald Dahl, one of my favourite authors of all times? There’s more, so I shall make a grab in the dark and choose that way, hopefully it won’t be too heavy and hit me on the head!

So, what are you all reading?  And what do you do with all of your books?

When we moved house nearly a year ago we came with over 150 moving cartons (including the furniture etc, that was two removal trucks over two days to load and then two days to unload!) Many boxes were filled with books, the removalists said they had never seen so many books in a house. We culled a lot of them and I am thinking I need to try it again. We love our books but we keep having to buy new bookcases. Our old house was 100 years old, came with individual rooms and lots of wall space, I dreamed of lining one whole room with books, a library,we had the space to do it. Our new house is newer, open plan and has lots of large windows through which we sit and watch wildlife such as wallabies, pademelons, kookaburra’s, echidnas and parrots. The price we have paid for that joy are very few walls to place bookcases against. In fact, after a year, I still have our artworks and pictures bubble-wrapped and piled along the hall, wondering where to hang them all. So, do I have to cull books? I think the time has come.

Anyway, this week I plan to start a new book. Unlike my daughter and her dad, I can only read one at a time, I can only exist in one parallel universe at any one time aside from those I am creating for my own work. As I will be working on drawing dinosaurs for a new book by Amanda Niland, perhaps I will have to choose one off my sons shelves, they are probably gathering dust as it has been many years since they were reading about dinosaurs. But like their mother, they see their books as precious and they will sit on the shelves for revisiting and lending to their now,’ almost dinosaur’ Mum

Happy reading.

My Blog has been haunting me for the last couple of weeks, thus my post title, Best laid plans…….

Unlike other jobs I have  had in my distant past, and that list is quite varied…. being a writer and now, an author, this job has no set hours, no holidays, no sick leave and no carers leave. My boss is the most difficult I have ever had to deal with (& I’ve had a few). She is slack when she needs to motivate me, she is a slave driver when I am least able and she lays on the guilt thick and fast about my lack of productivity and my inability to rise above my domestic circumstances. I don’t have a union that protects me against such a boss and no communication with her gets me very far, though to her credit she does listen before she pushes me to achieve more.

As a writer, I am in charge of my own hours, it is not a nine to five job. Obviously, I have times when I can write and times when I can’t but part of the writing process, in fact most of it is ideas development, thinking, processing and growing ideas inside your head. But what happens if your head is spilling over with other stuff that has nothing to do with writing?

So my two-week absence has been forced parenting leave. My boss isn’t happy, in fact she often sits and puts her head in her hands and has a quiet sigh of frustration. It’s not as if she didn’t know, it’s not as if she didn’t have previous experience with these events or any advance notice of this happenings but still she sets the bar too high and is disappointed. School holidays occur in Tasmania three times a year, though soon that will change to four, so it is an annual event. Scheduled and with notice. Her excuse is that the kids are older now so I should be able to work regardless. Sadly it doesn’t work that way, regardless of age (and they are all teens now, three of them, for a short time). This time I planned for the desk to shut down and the writing to slow (although I have discovered a wonderful way to have the children, if I can still call them that, leave me alone….start to read them your first draft of a story, they flee, whining and complaining in hormonally tainted groans and they hide for the afternoon) even though they are not under foot as much they still expect me to be hanging around ready to be available for whatever need they have, they are bigger bodied which means that clothes take more space in the washing machine and they fight with each other about the important things in life: music taste and volume, who’s turn it is to wash up, cook or take the rubbish out and refuse to do chores unless asked more than three times and then under threat. For two weeks I have been a policeman, a traffic controller and peace keeper. I might not have to change nappies, wipe snotty noses or go head to head with toddler nap time but getting teens out of bed (maybe I should just leave them there!) certainly drains creative energy.

So, a note to my boss: Advance notice, in September there will be more school holidays (thankfully not coinciding with uni break so we will have only two to deal with). I am going away with my iPad just incase I get a moment in the middle of the night to write. I am, this time, not setting any ideas in place that I might get some time to work, in fact, I am setting up a worse case scenario and then it can only get better. I am a glass half full sort of person but school holidays are empty glasses work wise. I am going to spend it with my kids, because even though they whinge and groan and hate listening to my scribblings they are in fact growing up very fast and soon, very soon, I will have more time to do the scribblings and keep my insane boss happy.

So, absence makes the heart grow fonder and more determined. When I am absent it will be because I’m on parenting leave and my blog will just rest, like a good wine, as will my ideas and thoughts for my writing, which are fun to share with my family when we are driving as they can’t escape, and then they get a taste of my boss as well.

Happy writing

Christina (the Boss!)

I am writing because I was up so late last night and the wee hours of the morning setting up the blog, I went to bed with a wired brain which  started to  resolve a story  (instead of sleeping) I have been brewing for quite a few weeks now. A ‘thicker’ story, not a PB.

As a writer , as with anyone, I need to do it my way. I have spent a lot of time in the past studying how other ‘famous’ writers do it and thought that must be the way but have now discovered it has to be done your way. That’s what makes us individuals and creates such wonderful unique stories. I am a head writer. I write inside my head and then put it down onto paper. With a picture book, it is usually scribed down the old-fashioned way with a pencil into a 32 page cheap exercise book from Officeworks (they sell them in bulk in January so I go and stock up) then it is typed up on the word processor. I do now however have an iPad (a great Christmas/birthday gift from my patron of the arts, my hard-working hubby who supports my habit) which I can hand write onto also, use in the car when waiting for kids etc etc. For my longer stuff, I work on it for weeks and weeks in my head until I am brave enough to type out some bits and pieces.

It rarely has the same wonder on the screen as it does in my head and to date, after writing 2000 words I am often exhausted, after all, that is equivalent to four picture books and that is a years work on its own.

The new story I am working on will not be measured, it’s a bit like watching the clock during exercise class and that just makes the aerobics seem harder! I am just going to write. Last night I had a new character pop into my head and walk right through it, where he came from I have no idea but he is an important character for my story. I have images now, like a movie running in my head (which is probably why the words never hit the page behaving themselves). My characters have names which is new to me, they often develop as I try to write, and I have a frame-work for the beginning, a middle and the end, if it exists as it may be a hanging one. I even have twists and turns forming and I can hear them speaking…..

In any other place I would be locked away and treated with very strong medication but I love this job, I am meant to be a little insane, off the edge and when I wake up tired, I will probably do my best work because my head kept me awake half the night discussing  a story!

Yawn, off to start my masterpiece….

Christina

What do I do?  I write stories for children, mostly picture books but with aspirations for some ‘thicker’ stuff. I also colour in for a living, yes, I’m an illustrator.

Why do I do it?  Because it beats lots of other jobs, I can do it in my pyjamas and tasteless slippers with no make up on, I can listen to what ever music I like, I meet lots of really clever talented people and best of all….I LOVE IT.

Like all jobs there are good days and bad days, bad paint days, good paint days, bad word days, no word days, lots of word days and intense word days. You can follow me here if you can bear to. It might be an interesting journey into the mind and life of an author and illustrator.

What have I done already?  Well, if you are curious about my books so far, you can find me fighting for attention with my character Kip, 2010 CBCA Honour Book (Windy Hollow Books), you can find my name as author on Potato Music, illustrated by the very talented Pete Groves (Omnibus/Scholastic), and I am featured on the cover (name only!) of Purinina, A Devil’s Tale, 2008 CBCA Notable Book (Lothian/Hachette).

I have illustrated many others for wonderful authors and am currently working on a book about dinosaurs in a zoo (see, I have the best job in the world).

Look out, this blog might make you totally jealous or inspire you to distraction, or it might just cause you to pity me…we will have to wait and see.

Christina