Heads Up Illustrators and Author/Illustrators – the SCBWI-L.A. 2019 Mentorship is for You!

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illustrators, Jennifer Fitzgerald, mentoring, mentorships, Monica Mancillas, SCBWI community, SCBWI members, volunteering, volunteers

By Karol Ruth Silverstein, SCBWI-L.A. Contest Coordinator

SCBWI-L.A. PAL member Bethany Barton is the 2019 Mentor! This year’s mentorship contest is for illustrators and author/illustrators and we’ll be accepting applications from February 15 through March 22.

To encourage applicants, we thought we’d check in with last year’s mentees, Monica Mancillas and Jennifer Fitzgerald, to see how their mentorship experience went.

KAROL RUTH SILVERSTEIN: What did you hope to get out of the mentorship when you first applied?

JENNIFER FITZGERALD: I am just starting out writing for children, so initially I was looking for guidance in getting started. My biggest issue is time management. I’m a business owner and a parent, which means time to sit and think can be at a minimum. I needed someone to be accountable to, someone who I could trust to send me an email out of nowhere saying, “How’s it going? What are you working on right now? Send me something.” It made making time to write more real to me and I really needed that.

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Volunteer Spotlight: Lisze Bechtold, SCBWI-LA Illustrator Coordinator, Illustrator Events

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Buster the Very Shy Dog, Edna’s Tale, Illustration, illustrators, Lisze Bechtold, Sally and the Purple Socks, SCBWI events, SCBWI members

Lisze Bechtold is an animator as well as an author & illustrator of picture books and early readers. Her published works include Edna’s Tale, Sally and the Purple Socks (a Children’s Choice and Imagination Library book), and the award-winning Buster the Very Shy Dog series. She has taught workshops, reviewed portfolios, and studied writing with such luminaries as Myra Cohn Livingston and Patricia Lee Gauch. A long-time member and volunteer for the SCBWI, she’s co-coordinated several SCBWI Illustrator Days, sits on the L.A. Regional Board, and has quite a few ideas and events in mind for our region’s illustrators and author/illustrators. “What ideas and events?” you ask? We wondered that too, along with a few other questions you didn’t even know you wanted to ask. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with this installment of “Volunteer Spotlight.”

SARAH PARKER-LEE: Just in case anyone out there has avoided approaching you at events or something because of this, before we go any further, how do you pronounce your name?

LISZE BECHTOLD: “Liz” or “Lizzie”, if you need to pronounce all the extra letters.

SPL: Phew! We haven’t been saying it incorrectly! (Introverts worst nightmare.) With that out of the way… You’ve been an SCBWI volunteer for a long time, off and on, why did you recently take up the mantle of Illustrator Coordinator?

LB: I had too much fun coordinating the illustrator contests at the 2016 Writer/Illustrator Day and realized as an author AND illustrator, I have specific insight into the different needs and interests of each. I love connecting people who should meet, as well as the detective part of helping other artists — pointing out their strengths and the direction they are already taking that perhaps they themselves may not have noticed.

SPL: As an experienced illustrator and author, what types of workshops, exercises, or tools have helped you?

SCBWI Central Coast Regional News, Second Quarter 2018

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book talk online, illustrators, Lynn Becker, Mary Ann Fraser, Mary Penney Hershey, mentorship, picture books, SCBWI events, workshops

By Ann Rousseau Smith, SCBWI CenCal News Liaison

A Changing of the Guard

By Mary Ann Fraser

Change seems to be one of the few reliable constants at play in the universe, and so it is with our region. I will soon be moving, and since regional advisors must live within the areas they serve, as of March 1, 2018 I officially stepped down from my post. Thankfully, the talented, hard-working, and did I mention best Assistant Regional Advisor a region could ask for, Rebecca Langston-George, stepped up to take my place. I have no doubt that she will do an outstanding job. I have thoroughly enjoyed serving our region for the past many years, first as Regional Kite Tales Editor, then as Illustrator Coordinator, and most recently as Regional Advisor. Before all of that, along with Lisze Bechtold, I also coordinated several local SCBWI Illustrator Retreats. As a result, I have had the joy of meeting and working with so many people I admire and the honor of calling many of them friends. I will miss you all, but please know that in my heart I will forever be a CenCal Gal!

Wishing you all endless inspiration and great success in all you do,

Mary Ann

SCBWI Cen-Cal 2018 Mentor Program

Our 2018 Mentee is…

Toot Your Horn!

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authors, illustrators, published, publishing, SCBWI members

 

Five-Minute True Stories: Animal Rescue, by Aubre Andrus, Scholastic, ages 4-8, Nonfiction, ISBN: 1-338-20006-2, released 03/27/2018 

 

Great News!

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authors, illustrators, published, publishing, SCBWI members

SCBWI loves celebrating our members’ successes and noteworthy news, and there are many! Read on to find out who’s got something to shout about. Digital high-fives welcome in the comments!

 

 

Hatching Chicks in Room 6 by Caroline Arnold was named a 2017 Eureka! Honor book by the California Reading Association. The Eureka! awards are for excellence in nonfiction.

 

Emma Chichester Clark’s TOTO Illustration Process and Her Muse—Her Dog, Plum

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chapter book, Dogs, Emma Chichester Clark, HarperCollins, illustrator, illustrator tips, illustrators, interview, Michael Morpurgo, middle grade, Plum, The Wizard of Oz, Toto

Emma Chichester Clark is the illustrator of the beautiful middle-grade chapter book, Toto: The Dog-Gone Amazing Story of the Wizard of Oz. Its 250+ full-color images showcase Chichester Clark’s signature style.

CHRISTINE VAN ZANDT: Welcome to Kite Tales! In Toto, you collaborate once again with author, Michael Morpurgo. How does illustrating well-known stories differ from working on new fiction? Does having a dog as the narrator change your focus when you work on the art?

EMMA CHICHESTER CLARK: In fact, it’s my sixth collaboration with Michael. We have also done versions of Pinocchio, Aesop’s Fables, Hansel and Gretel, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and a Christmas story called The Best of Times. Almost all of them were about well-known characters and I had to find my own ideas about that. This is a challenge because the images we all already know so well are imprinted in our heads. With each character, I have to draw and redraw them, over and over again, until I find someone that belongs to me but who is, at the same time, true to the character I’m representing. [In Toto], having a dog as the narrator was the most fun of all because I adore dogs. I have one, Plum, who is not unlike Toto in appearance and I spend a lot of my time trying to interpret what is going on in her doggy brain.

CVZ: You are also an author. Please give us some insight into your process, both as an illustrator and an author-illustrator.

Toot Your Horn!

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authors, illustrators, published, publishing, SCBWI members

It’s Black Friday! Don’t forget that you can purchase books today, and small business Saturday, and cyber Monday! Here are some members whose books have recently become available!

Lint Boy, by Aileen Leijten, Clarion, ages 8-12, Graphic Novel, ISBN: 978-00544-52860-4, released 06/27/2017.

 

 

 

Great News!

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authors, illustrators, news, publishing, SCBWI members

SCBWI loves celebrating our members’ successes and noteworthy news, and there are many to be thankful for as Thanksgiving approaches! Read on to find out who’s got something to shout about. If you have something to be thankful for, kid-lit-related or otherwise, share in the comments! We here at SCBWI Los Angeles and Kite Tales are thankful for each and every one of you!

 

 

Rabbi the Rabbit, by Shireen Hakim, was published in the “Out of Many, One: Celebrating Diversity” anthology. It also won an award by the anthology publisher, Houston Writers Guild Press, on April 5, 2017.

Mentor Program Dynamic Duo Delivers on Ambitious Goals

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Carmel O'Mara-Horwitz, illustrator tips, illustrators, mentors, mentorship, SCBWI members

By Marcelle Greene, SCBWI-L.A. Contest Coordinator Emeritus

Carmel O’Mara-Horwitz & Cassandra Federman

Whether you’ve thought of mentoring, or dreamed of having a mentor – this year’s mentorship team demonstrates how a seasoned professional working with a promising newcomer benefits everyone involved.

Mentor Carmel-O’Mara Horwitz started working with selected mentee, illustrator Cassandra Federman, on May 1^st, and they set an ambitious goal: improve Cassandra’s portfolio, including the creation of a new piece, and update her website before the SCBWI Summer Conference. They had two months and six days.

Illustrator Gallery: Ellen Jin Over, PhotoShop, & Art Directing for Animation

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animation, Ellen Jin Over, illustrator tips, illustrators, PhotoShop, SCBWI members

Ellen Jin Over is an art director, visual development artist, and illustrator. She’s also our featured artist in this quarter’s Illustrator Gallery! Her work has appeared on televisions all over the world for the last 20 years. Spirit Riding Free, now on Netflix, is her latest project. Before that, she was art director on Disney’s Tinkerbell movies for nine years.

She didn’t always know what she wanted to do with her life until her senior year in high school pushed her to figure it out. “I got lucky that my long-forgotten childhood obsession of drawing and making paper dolls suddenly came back to my mind one day and I decided to major in art. After studying illustration at Otis, I stumbled upon a job interview for a position in an animation company.” The rest is history! Her program of choice is Adobe PhotoShop, something we tend to think of for editing photos, not creating illustrations, but Ellen does beautiful things with it! She tells us more in the interview below.

Sarah Parker-Lee: How did you choose to use Photoshop over other programs?

Ellen Jin Over: Photoshop has been around for 30 years. When I was going to school in the early 90’s, that was the only computer software that was available for students at Otis School of Art and Design. It was mostly for graphic designers. It just happened that illustrators like me found it useful to create images too…Photoshop started to be used more in some animation studios for digital paintings [in the] late 90’s.

There are many painting software today such as Painter, Coral Painter, Illustrator, etc–some for professionals and some for “regular Joe” doodling. I just have not found any other software that is comparable to Photoshop. It’s fast and easy.

SPL: Do you only work digitally or do you do any hand drawing? What do you think are the benefits of each?