I woke in the night last night, and said “James! Hsst! James?”

He said “Hrggzzzt….?”

I said “If storks carry babies, then vultures must carry zombie babies!”

There was a pause, and then he said, enunciating very clearly, “What the hell, man….hggggzzzt…..”

Now I have a vague desire to paint the vulture carrying zombie babies…

Did a watercolor/mixed media/stuff on that watercolor paper-on-board stuff. The technique was cool. I’m sort of dissatisfied with the end result–I quite like the pangolin’s scales, and was glad to get them done, there’s nothing I actively DISLIKE, it just isn’t…enough. S’what I get for rushing a composition, I suppose.
http://yerf.com/vernursu/pangolinhammock.jpg

There’s a kind of dabby effect I’ve been interested in–very textural–that you get in the work of Scoff Gustafson and so forth. And I know it’s done with oils, but I’m trying to get it with acrylic and gouache because I’m stubborn that way, and I can’t do oils. Waiting for things to dry makes me insane with watercolor and acrylic–even if I DID shell out however much for a full glomph of oils, they’d find me clinging to the curtains by my teeth, shrieking about barbarian quail hordes, if it took a week to dry. And it doesn’t really want to work as a digital effect yet, although I suspect I can get it do so if I really work at it.

Looking over work by Gustafson also rekindles my vague desire to do an animal alphabet. Except that being me, I could never do a kid’s animal alphabet…I’d get through maybe “A is for Aardvark Artist,” and then my mind would snap, and we’d get “B is for Basted Bat with a Bong” and “C is for Capybara Conjuring Cthulhu (with cuddly cuttlefish!)” and by the time we hit “N is for Naked Mole-rat with Nipple Piercings and Nunchaku” and “P is for Pangolin Purchasing Porn” it’d have gone far beyond the realms of publishability, to say nothing of taste.

Meh. I get all these ideas, and lack the time to follow all of them to the end (time being money, after all.) The trick really oughta be to do up a few, write a proposal, and send it to publishers, so that they could pay me to work on something I wanted to work on. I just don’t really know how to go about it. Anybody know any good books or websites or advice for the children’s book industry?

The problem with being–if not direly poor, at least closer to that than t’alternative–is that you can’t take time to pursue a project that may bear monetary fruits much later down the road–it’s gotta be an immediate pay-off, or you don’t eat. Oh, well. (I have PMS like a ravening dingo bitch at the moment, so this fact is weighing on me more heavily than usual.)

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