Hello! Hope you all are well, somehow time got away from me and I haven’t shared a newsletter since October?! Happy late new year and hope you have had a good start to your year. I am going to do a rapid fire catch up to fill you in on what’s been happening in my life since October of last year but, let’s get to the most exciting thing first! The book I illustrated From the Farm, to Our Table is out April 2nd and I received my illustrator copies last week.
It is surreal seeing it in print for the first time and I don’t think I’ll ever get over that feeling of utter joy and excitement. It’s been about 3 years since I got the deal, started working on it, to receiving copies of it in the mail. I worked on the final color about a year ago by this point I always look back and find things I would do differently now, but overall I’m very happy with how it looks. It also made the ALA Booklist's 2024 Spring Youth Preview notable new titles list! Which I was overjoyed to find out you can check out the list here !
Let’s hop backwards in time to January. I celebrated by 26th birthday and finished illustrating my first book of the year (started last year finished this year) and as a birthday gift to myself I invested in a iMac. I had been contemplating this decision for a long time and finally took the plunge because more poor little laptop just couldn’t handle the work load of 3 different books I am working on at the moment. Let me just say it’s already made my life a lot easier.
Let’s talk deadlines,December and November (mostly November & January) I had multiple deadlines. Cover for a picture book sketch and final color, internal sketches for two others, final art for the one I sketched out in November. It was very busy and I do really love being busy but that means not much time for personal work or writing my newsletter. I am still learning scheduling and trying to keep a normalish work/life balance. My goal is Mon-Fri 9-5 with weekends and holidays off. It does get tricky as a creative who works from home as everyday tasks seem to be a perfect procrastination tool. For the most part I stick to it, but I find that my creativity/productivity seems to last about 4 hours before I start to get distracted or loose steam. So I try and really use those four hours to my advantage. All that being said, I’m so excited to eventually share the books I’m working on and I do really love this job.
It’s time to change things up…
I want to continue this newsletter but I think I am going to change when I share them and you let me know what schedule you’d like to see. Last year I was pretty good (up until the end) with keeping up with it monthly. I think now I want to try bi-monthly or quarterly. I am going leave a poll for you all so you let me know what you think?
That’s all from me for now, if you want more updates follow me on the usual socials I do share day in the life vlogs on TikTok and Instagram I even have one from a birthday celebration if you wanna check that out! Thanks for catching up with me and I’ll speak to you soon!