Sigh, this is a job I’d LOVE to go for… my alma mater, Capilano College, is hiring an illustration instructor. But I have a “little” issue of location, being that I’m on, you know… the other side of the world! So thought I’d pass this along to any illustrators in the Vancouver area who are keen to get into teaching at a great college :

WANTED: Illustration Instructors
Capilano University is looking for advanced level illustration instructors for two courses. If you’re a current working professional illustrator looking to share your experience, please apply!
http://capcollege.bc.ca/services/career/human-resources/employment-opportunities/faculty.html

At first I was horrified to read this post on Drawn! about the Orphan Works Act and the adverse affects it could have on protecting illustration copyrights. But then I started reading some of the responses to said post, and came across Dan Heller’s writeup  which served me up some humble pie, as I realized I had taken on this doom & gloom perspective on the act without actually reading it myself! So I recommend to other illustrators out there who have heard of this act and have had a similar lump-in-your-throat reaction to it that I did… have a read of the actual act, or Dan’s dissection of it, then make up your mind! As for me, I don’t feel so worried about it… I’ll just keep making sure my work has my name on it, and do what I can to not make it easy for people to steal my images online or otherwise.

Well after a little navel gazing, I’ve updated my Top 10 Illustrations list…

Tom Krause |”The Little Boy’s Smile” children’s book illustrations

(Read on …)

It seems that everywhere you turn, products and businesses are going (or claiming to go) “green.” Among the ambiguous buzz words is “zero waste,” which implies that your product or service creates no waste from its infancy to death… it is created from renewable materials and is able to be reused or recycled, avoiding landfill.

But how realistic is it for an office (or art studio!) to create zero waste? The GreenBiz article, The Zero Waste Office : Is it possible?, addresses that question, and gives some great achievable goals that we designers & illustrators can adopt into running our own green creative studios :

“At this time zero waste is more of a journey than something that can be achieved,” said Larry Chalfan of the Zero Waste Alliance, a non-profit consortium of educational, government, business and other groups. “Too much of the things we need simply aren’t ready for us to truly be zero waste. That said, a lot can be done, and many organizations make the goal ‘zero waste to landfill’ and then further define it to mean over 90 percent of waste being diverted into reuse or recycling.”

For more info on how to be a greener designer, check out these other tips & posts on my blog!

This Saturday, March 29th, aside from celebrating my 28th birthday, I’ll be satisfying my creative and green sides by participating in SketchCrawl 18, followed by playing a game of Settlers of Catan by candlelight during Earth Hour from 8pm-9pm.

Earth Hour is an event set up by the WWF, where they’ve encouraged thousands of people worldwide to turn off their lights for one hour to increase awareness of the need for action to act against global warming. Just switch your lights off between 8pm-9pm your time… and if you’re really enthusiastic, switch all electrical appliances off, too. Then take a moonlit walk outside and watch the stars with friends, or just take a catnap for an hour. For more details check out the Earth Hour website. (They’ve got a cool web-banner in which your name floats by once you’ve signed up, ta-hee!)

SketchCrawl 18 is basically the artist version of a pub crawl… meet up with a bunch of friends / artists, and sketch like crazy all day! Combine it with some good food (or even with a pub crawl!) and unique locations to visit, then visit the Sketch Crawl forum to share your sketches! Our sketches will be up on my blog as well as on the SketchCrawl forum under Adelaide.

Well, I’m (kind of) back from my time off for maternity leave… as much as I can be back into the swing of things with a new little girl to take care of 24/7! My day is now broken down from one feed or diaper change to the next, with not a lot of time in between for myself… but it’s sooooo worth it!
I have thoroughly enjoyed the last five weeks since Hera was born, especially having my husband home on paternity leave, and both my parents visiting from Canada during that time. It certainly made the transition into motherhood much easier with all their support!

So this is going to be the first day of my gradual return to freelance illustrating… I’ve two books on the go at the moment, and will post their progress as I find time to work on them (during Hera’s afternoon naps!)

I’ve been testing out the myPANTONE online account coupled with their colour picker software, as I wanted to start saving palettes from my illustrations for future use.

The myPANTONE online account is kind of fun, in the sense that you’re part of a colour loving community with a lot of colour inspiration available to you. The best part is sharing & collecting colour palettes… I’ve created an account and am sharing palettes from my children’s book illustrations.

When you click on any individual palette, you can see the palette in more detail… rolling over the swatches brings up their Pantone and RGB values. You can also upload an image that inspired the palette, as well as tag your palettes with keywords that describe it, so it’s easier for others to find. The futuristic sound effects every time you load the page is kind of irritating though.

The myPANTONE colour picker software is pretty easy to use… you can either create palettes from a colour wheel, or select an image and choose from it 12 swatches of colours to create your palette. The tabbed navigation is not user-friendly, as there is no text, just an obscure square patch of colour… you have to wait for the mouse-over text to pop up to see what the tab is for.

My main beef with it is that you can’t select more than 12 swatches of colour… and I use about 20+ colours to colour an entire children’s book digitally, so it isn’t quite the best all around colour picker for me. For my personal use, I may have to stick to creating my swatches in Photoshop and saving the palettes after each project… and just use the myPANTONE account & software for sharing & finding inspiration for colour.

I’m a bit of an organization freak… love labeling my artfiles, archiving my artwork in nicely wrapped packages, and keeping track in a spreadsheet the status of my illustrations (i.e. Sold, Available, Copyright ownership, Royalties earned on each, etc). That being said, a spreadsheet has its lacks in that it’s just a bunch of text, and colour coding is a pretty limited way of visually organizing the images. I wanted something visual and searchable.

So I don’t know why I didn’t think earlier of using iPhoto to create a visual, searchable catalogue of my illustrations… and since that epiphany, I’m in illustration cataloguing heaven!

What I love in particular is the tagging feature… I’ve probably created 2 dozen tags to describe the medium (watercolour, pencil, oil,) style (whimsical, traditional), subject matter (christmas, animals, wedding), year created, and clients for my illustrations. As I add new illustrations, I tag them (see below).

That way if I’m quoting for a client who is interested in my floral illustrations, I just do a search for “floral” (shown below) and all my illustrations tagged with “floral” pop up and I can quickly browse through to find what I need.

As well as the tagging options, you can rate your illustrations with a star system… pretty cool if you’re wanting to browse just what you deem is your best work for your portfolio. And like most photo programs, you can create albums… I’ve got a Portfolio album, so I can quickly browse through that for my best work when sending samples & quotes to clients.

Thought I’d share a photo of my little bundle of joy with you all… our daughter, Hera Castles, was born safe & sound on Feb 18th! Both Hera & I are doing well, and loving being at home with Daddy and Grandma & Grandpa. Such an incredible feeling being a mother now, I am loving getting to know our little girl and have just fallen in love with her. SO… back to maternity leave for me, baby & I need our rest.

Environment Canada’s new website has a regularly updated list of rebates for going green by offering rebates & incentives on everything green from free energy saving lightbulbs to money back for monthly transit passes, making it that little bit easier to run a green illustration or design business.