Cartwheeling down the back steps...

Finally it's rained again in Seattle! I know how ironic that must sound to anyone who probably thinks of this town as the rain capital of the world. In fact it rains as much in New York as Seattle... it's just here it takes all winter long and in the summer we often never get a drop.

This has been the driest summer on record here, with just 1/4" rain between April and the middle of September. In other words it only rained once all summer. The lawns turn brown and crunchy and no one bothers to water them. Even some of the old maple trees on my street looked like they were drying up and dying.

I find my brain cannot connect two consecutive thoughts when it's over 80 degrees in the dog days of late summer. Summer was great but thank gosh it's raining again. Rain = Life for me.

I've recently proven out a theory I had that all an illustrator needs to continue working are eyes to see with and just the drawing arm from the elbow down on one's drawing hand.

I've been recovering from a backwards cartwheel down the kitchen steps and landing on the concrete walkway. And no, it wasn't a fall off the ladder pictured in last month's blog, in case you're guessing. Amazingly I didn't break my neck and even more amazingly I could still manage to do illustration, since my right arm still worked. That's all we really need to keep working, after all... eyes to see with and just from the elbow down on our drawing hand.

My body throbbed with pain for about a week. I could only hobble up and down steps one at a time. But I could still draw. But now I'm almost all better. I read that Dylan Thomas always needed to have something wrong with him... a broken foot, a cane to walk with, anything so that he had limits.



This month's illustrations are from a magazine piece I did for Highlights.

I recently found out through on an online friend that these little spots had been turned into an online animated poem with music. People seem to enjoy what Highlights did with it... they must have clipped out the main piggy character and added in the missing bits of the background, and then used a program to add the motion and music and voiceover.

www.highlightskids.com/Stories/AudioStories/Sept06_squealyScholar.asp

If that link doesn't work, you can just Google the term 'Squealy Scholar' and that brings up a link.