Three Takeaways from the Winter 2021 SCBWI Virtual Conference by Sara Kendall

First of all, thank you so much to Shutta Crum, the generous lady behind “Shutta’s Scholarship” which allowed me to attend the Winter 2021 SCBWI Conference.

This was my first time attending one of the big SCBWI conferences, as well as my first virtual one, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, given that my most recent experience with Zoom was accidentally leaving my microphone off on a virtual doctor’s visit. 

Overall, I was amazed at their coordination! There were only one or two instances of accidental muting, and of course the rogue dog or child, but the conference generally ran like a well-oiled Rube Goldberg machine. It amazed me that I was able to leech inspiration from great minds in the industry while guzzling cocoa and wearing sweatpants.

The segments were many, and there’s no way I can go into detail about all of them here, but here are my favorite takeaways from a weekend of crash course knowledge and summer-camp-style belonging.

Takeaway 1: “We’re all in this together."

With thousands of digital attendees from all 50 states and some 62 countries, the conference had no business feeling as cozy as it did, but on the first day, when Matt de la Peña read us his and illustrator Christian Robinson’s new book Milo Imagines the World, as one would to a class of grade schoolers, I felt like I could have been sitting cross-legged on colorful carpet and waiting for the page-turns alongside everyone else listening in. I almost cried; the book was beautiful, the illustrations simple and evocative, and the gentle act of being read to was surprisingly healing. 

I thought I got sick of this idea of “being in this together” at the beginning of the pandemic, when car insurance commercials and fast food places used it to death. But here I was hearing from people in my field who needed to dredge up artistry in the midst of a pandemic and who admitted to having difficulties similar to my own, and all of a sudden this saying popped back into my head and started to mean something less trite. 

Takeaway 2: So many different people need to work together to pull off a kid’s book!

This was a theme exemplified at the Simon & Schuster virtual office tour, a segment on the first day of the conference, where Laurent Linn, Art Director at Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers, acted as MC as we jumped from zoom window to zoom window to meet a representative from every department that makes a kids’ book come together. 

The art department, the publishing department, the managing editorial department and the production department are chock full of people dedicated to making your book a success. They bounce work back and forth between themselves, from nitty gritty details like balancing budgets, all the way to choosing paper and special finishes for the final book. To a publisher, every book is an investment, and every author or illustrator has a team behind them and working with them to make sure that investment makes bank. 

At the mock book cover/ book design production meeting, hosted by Yaffa Jaskoll, Executive Art Director at Scholastic, we saw another team of editors and designers who worked together like a friendly machine. We were shown the steps, from mood boards and finding an illustrator, to final sketches and branding, that lead to the advent of several dazzling covers that gave me heart eyes. 

We saw the options and the design roads that could have been taken, and most interestingly of all, why they weren’t taken. It took me back to when Christian Robinson showed us how he used little teensy sticky notes to rough out a book, and the piles of crumpled and ruined sticky notes he had to go through to get there. 

Takeway 3: A great deal of mess and effort is necessary to make something beautiful. 

A few more examples in this vein stuck with me from interviews at the Illustrator’s Intensive, which was an extra event that took place the Monday after the conference concluded: 

• Illustrator Jing Jing Tsong went through 12 rounds of sketches for most spreads in her upcoming book, and thought up and roughed out a whole B-plot that didn’t end up being used.

• Illustrator Archana Sreenivasan made a trip to rural India to do hands-on research, and to meet the peoples profiled for her book Desert Girl, Monsoon Boy by Tara Dairman.

Sometimes as illustrators it’s easy to look at our heroes and imagine their work having sprung fully formed and perfect from their skulls, but the Illustrator’s Intensive was useful in that it pulled back that curtain and showed us people working hard and trying things out and doing their job. Jing Jing Tsong said it best when she emphasized the need to explore and make mistakes in order to find your way to the idea that you wish you had thought up in the first place.

Portraits by Sara Kendall

At the end of the conference, I was still alone and in my sweatpants, and my hot cocoa was now just a delicious stain in my mug, but I felt connected to thousands of other attendees and inspired in a way I had not expected. I can’t wait to attend in person, but weirdly I feel like I already did.

Sara Kendall is a middle grade illustrator who loves drawing adventurous kids with the fun kind of teeth that haven't yet been wrangled into braces. She's looking to expand into middle grade book covers, to make a dent in her to-read pile, and to go to the movies again one day (or at least to eat Swedish Fish in the dark). You can find her work on instagram @sarakendall.art, and on twitter @skillustrative. Her email is art@sarakendall.net, and her website is sarakendall.net.

Coming up on The Mitten Blog this spring: 

Book Birthdays, a Writer Spotlight, Equity & Inclusion Corner, interviews with our SCBWI-MI illustration mentors, a new Featured Illustrator, and much more!

Have you registered for the SCBWI-MI (Virtual) Spring Conference?

Find everything you need to know here: 
https://michigan.scbwi.org/2020/05/01/spring-conference-2021/

Please join SCBWI for #StopAsianHate Virtual Action Day, Friday, March 26, 2001

Read the full statement at: https://www.scbwi.org/stopasianhate/

Members for Members Scholarship: Supporting Inclusivity in Children’s Literature

This scholarship awards a one-year SCBWI membership to a Michigan writer or illustrator.

Qualifications: Must be a Michigan resident actively working toward creating children’s books that resonate with diverse readers.

Award: Awardees will receive a year’s membership to SCBWI beginning April 1 if awardee is a new member. If the awardee is a current member, the membership will be extended for a year.

Deadline: Applications are accepted February 14 through March 14. Winner(s) will be announced on or about April 1 each year. ***Application deadline for the 2021 M4M Scholarship has been extended to April 1st. Winners will be announced by April 15th.

For more information and to apply go to: M4M Scholarship Application

Illustration Process: Creating the Pokagon Retreat Logo by Sara Kendall

When Kirbi Fagan and Deb Pilutti approached me with the opportunity to create an illustration for the SCBWI Pokegon Writers and Illustrators Retreat, I jumped at the chance! The prompt was very broad, with a light suggestion towards something nature-themed, so I would get free-reign to create whatever my little heart desired. Here’s how my little heart did just that.

Step 1: Ideating!

It’s often the case that the broader an assignment is, the more difficult it is to narrow my ideas down. But in this case, I zeroed in on the idea of writers and illustrators on vacation in the wilderness pretty quickly. But how to show that these two random people I was drawing having fun in the woods were a writer and an illustrator?

I could depict them with the stereotypical tools of their trade (an easel, a fancy quill pen) but that seemed kind of clunky, and not as indicative of the “having fun” part of the retreat. Plus, I would have to pick what kind of person exemplified an illustrator and which exemplified a writer, and I didn’t want to exclude any gender or race from being either one of these things! Agh—anxiety!

But! What if there were people the viewer could immediately look at and recognize as an artist and a writer?  Then they could do whatever fun things they wanted without cluttering up the painting, and it would get the idea across quicker.


Step 2: Thumbnails!

So I had to think of two people who personify art and writing. When I think of writing I think of Shakespeare. Everyone knows what he looks like, plus he’s got a fun collar. But for art, I had some difficulty. I needed someone recognizable, so it had to be someone who did a lot of self-portraits. But I’m familiar with a lot of artists that people who didn’t go to art school might not know, so it was hard to filter my choices by the likelihood they’d be recognized by someone who wasn’t me. I thought I’d do Van Gogh at first, because everyone knows him, but his story is just so sad, and showing him with that ear bandage really brought the happy-woods-party vibe down. (Even though I thought it would be pretty funny to show him listening to music with only one ear on the headphones like a DJ.)

Here’s my messy, messy proto-thumbnails from the Van Gogh times.

Then I thought of Frida Kahlo! I’d seen the movie Coco, so I knew at least Pixar thought she was well-known enough to make a reference to. (See that movie, people.) Plus, Frida was an awesome lady. Plus plus, this way it wouldn’t just be two white dudes in the woods.

I sent in my final thumbnail to Kirbi and Deb, and after a round of corrections and a flood of expert art direction, arrived at the final value and design.
Before art direction:

Aaaand…final pencils! Plus my color study.

Step 3: Final drawing/Painting!

I usually paint with Acrylic Ink and Casein, on Strathmore 500 series Illustration Board. Acrylic Ink is great for vibrant washes and the flat colors I like, and Casein is a milk-derived paint that I was introduced to at the College for Creative Studies, and that I love to use for rendering. It’s water based and handles like a cross between gouache, oil and delicious, delicious butter.  Handily, it’s rework-able too.

However, this time I added something different to the mix. I’ve been having trouble with the glare I get when scanning in sections with opaque acrylic ink in the darker colors, blue especially. To save myself a lot of trouble, I needed to make it more matte. So I did a lot of experiments and found that the most matte I could make paint was by using some cheap chalk paint.

Its saturation is nowhere near as good as acrylic ink, but I was able to make a much more matte surface by mixing the two together. Incidentally, matte medium disappointed me so severely in my trials that it is now dead to me. Our relationship is now on “I have no son,” terms.

I usually take more in-process photos that this on my phone, so I can see the whole painting developing without walking all the way across the room and squinting.

Here you can see I’ve transferred the final drawing to board, and put down my first Acrylic Ink wash in a yellowish green, which I wanted to be the prevailing color to unify the painting. I’ve started blocking in the flat shapes in acrylic ink, dutifully mixed with chalk paint for the darker colors.

I’ve got the faces in now! I’m following my color study thumbnail religiously here. Whenever I had trouble matching the two up, I would take a quick photo with my phone and adjust the colors in Photoshop until they matched, then make the necessary changes in real life.

Step 4: Scanning and Adjusting!

Using an Epson Expression Graphic Arts Scanner, I scanned the painting in two pieces and and fit it together in Photoshop (it was a little big for the scanner). Then I broke out the clone tool to erase some mistakes, and added a few more layers to make the final adjustments until I was happy that it was reading well, value and color-wise. Lastly, I scanned in some grass shapes I’d made with a brush and ink, adjusted the colors, and added the mirrored shapes to the bottom of the design.
Done!

The amazing type I credit all to Deb Pilutti! I’d like to thank her, and Kirbi Fagan for their art direction and support, as well as getting me word of this amazing project.

I hope all of you will think of visiting the Pokagon Writers and Illustrators Retreat!  If Shakespeare and Frida have anything to say about it, it promises to be a blast.

Sara Kendall was born and raised in southeast Michigan, and earned a BFA in 2017 from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She is the recipient of the 2018 SCBWI MI mentorship competition, and has been featured in the 2016 Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Competition, the Society of Illustrators West 55 Show, Communication Arts Magazine’s Interactive Annual 23, and the 3x3 International Illustration Annual No. 14 website. When she’s not painting, she enjoys building up a horde of books she will eventually find time to read. See more of her work at http://www.sarakendall.net and find her on Instagram @sarakendall.art. 







Save the date: October 5-7, 2018 (Registration opens August 1st)
SCBWI Michigan & Indiana Writer & Illustrator Retreat, Pokagon State Park, Indiana

Do you want to get away from it all this fall and CREATE? How about some time to RECHARGE with your creative buddies? Would you like some inspiring craft sessions to MOVE FORWARD?

We hear you!

SCBWI Indiana and Michigan are teaming up to provide a weekend creative retreat in beautiful Pokagon State Park. The Park is located in northeast Indiana near Angola and is just off I-69.

The cozy and comfortable Potawatomi Inn Resort and Conference Center within the Park will be the venue for lodging, retreat events, and meals.

This Retreat is designed for writers and illustrators at every level of experience. It will provide a perfect blend of creative time, craft-related sessions, critiques, and socializing/connecting.

Three or four optional craft sessions will be offered on Saturday and Sunday morning. Afternoons will be left open for creating, paid PAL level critiques, and/or optional peer critique groups for writers and illustrators. Optional social events will be held Friday and Saturday evenings.

Fee: $125 SCBWI members, $150 not yet members.

Your investment includes: lunch and dinner on Saturday and lunch on Sunday, all programming, peer critique groups, and socials. Dinner on Friday night and breakfasts both days are available for purchase in the Potawatomi Inn dining room. (Or if you’d rather stay in your pj’s and nibble your own treats in your room, feel free.)

Paid critiques and portfolio reviews by PAL members will be available for purchase in advance of the Retreat.

Lodging: Our negotiated rate for a double room is $89.00 per night plus 12% IN sales tax. Attendees must register by September 4, 2018. After this date, rooms will be released for general sale. All reservations can be made by calling the Inn’s Central Reservations number (877) 563-4371 or through the Inn’s website www.indianainns.com. Use group code 1005SC. Individuals will be responsible for room and incidental charges. To view rooms, click HERE. Note, no pets allowed. A Gate Fee ($7 in state, $9 out of state) will be charged to all parties who have overnight rooms per Pokagon State Park policy.

Do you want to be a presenter? View the Proposal Form HERE. Deadline for submission: April 1, 2018. Announcements of accepted proposals: on or before May 30, 2018. Presenters receive $50 credit towards the retreat fee for each accepted proposal.

Download event schedule HERE!

Are you a PAL member? Do you provide effective critiques or portfolio reviews? View the Paid Critique or Portfolio Review Application Form HERE.

Registration opens August 1, 2018 (But you can apply to provide critiques or portfolio reviews now).


Coming up on the Mitten blog: Stop by next Friday to learn about the Path to Promotion: a six-week online book publicity course. But first, mark your calendars for Thursday March 15th when registration opens for the SCBWI-MI spring conference!

https://michigan.scbwi.org/2018/02/11/unearth-your-funny-bone-getting-serious-about-writing-humor/