I'm heading to ALA, and other things

Hello everyone! 

This week, I am headed to Philadelphia for the American Library Association’s annual conference. I’ll be there with my publisher to promote Angelica and the Bear Prince (which recently got a starred review from Kirkus), so please let me know if you’ll be in attendance. As always, I’ll be delighted to see you in person! There's a version of the above image with my actual photo, but I made the one with the cartoon because I do loathe being perceived.

You can pre-order the book here! I highly encourage you to do it through your local bookstores or to request copies at your public library.

It’s been a busy month for me. I’ve mostly been working through pages for Laurel’s book, and I’m pleased with where the inks are at this stage. I’m about a fifth of the way through the book, and I’m hoping to finish inks by November.

I’m at the stage of the book where I’ve asked an intern to compile references for me, like, “Hello, can you tell me what Johns Hopkins looked like in the middle of the 1980s, and also can you get me photo references for what MRI machines looked like at the time?” And they delivered! 

I recently completed a large ink drawing, a remake of a Nightcrawler cover, and I’m pretty pleased with it. 

I’m also experimenting with figuring out how to photograph my traditional work on my phone so I don’t have to use my flatbed scanner as much. It’s not too bad!

I don't ordinarily work this big. 11"x17" is not atypical for comics artists, but it is odd for me since I usually work very small—I draw my comic pages to size, which usually ends up being right around 5.5"x8.5" most of the time.

In other news, the bantam chickens appear to be thriving in the chicken coop. They have their own little coop—the big hens treat them like any other new chickens, so there are some pecks dished out here and there, but I worry about the bantams being so tiny! They’ll top out at about one-eighth the size of a regular chicken, and the other hens we have are Brahmas, which are the largest possible backyard chicken breed available to us.

They love to hang out under the peony bush and eat the little leaves off the partridge pea plants.

Oh yes, and I owe you an extended post full of mermaid drawings! I'll post those up next.