It's time for Me-vember!

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I know - that is truly a horrible analogy. What kind of person would eat an elephant?! But it's something I often have to remind myself of, because I get so overwhelmed when faced with a large task.

This blog has been an elephant I needed to eat for a long time. (OK - analogy let go....NOW!)

I've decided to participate in the #NaBloPoMo challenge, where you post a blog post everyday in the month of November. I'm breaking down my goals into bite-size pieces where I can tackle one small topic everyday.

I want to approach this blog both as a journaling exercise for myself to document improving my work with papersculpture, learning (re-learning?) narrative illustration, and writing picture books. I also want to help build a reference for others who might be interested in a similar method of working, because I feel like I really struggled to find resources when I was starting out. (More on that on tomorrow's post).

In the summer, I was fortunate to take a class and participate in a workshop with Debbie Ridpath Ohi who is a social media guru! She encouraged me to build these blog posts so that potential agents/art directors would be able to understand my process, and understand how we could work together.

I figured the best way to show my process was to work through a piece through the blog posts; I actually decided to work through two pieces, to broaden the potential opportunity for demonstrating techniques, etc. My goal, therefore, is to generate a sequential series of blog posts while creating these two pieces, allowing lots of opportunity for discussion of technique, media, etc.

I actually finished (!) Inktober this year - I think primarily because I limited myself to small simple drawings with a defined theme. I quite enjoyed the process, and want to apply some of my learning to this month's blog challenge. So I have chosen two of the drawings which most interested me (doesn't mean they were necessarily the best rendered or designed) to re-work as larger paper sculptures.

My theme for Inktober 2018 was feet and shoes - because I hate drawing them. I wanted to use this limited area to try and still show narrative and character. The two posts are shown below:

"Star" is from the folktale "The Star Maiden". https://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ait/ait12.htm

A maiden who lives in a star searches for the perfect place to live on earth. She chooses the yellow star center of a water lily.

Bottle is from the fairytale "The Spirit in the Bottle". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_in_the_Bottle A woodcutter's son finds a (demonic) spirit trapped in a bottle at the base of a tree.

Working slowly through these two pieces will also allow me to participate in another challenge - Slow-vember. Created basically as a way to relax after Inktober.

Also, for interests sake, I created a 30-sec video of the complete Inktober 2018 book. It was from a book I had made in a workshop, and I bound it too tight. I also had to add pages, so it got a little wonky at the end. Individual images can be found on my Instagram and Twitter @JoniLNemeth.