Still Summer...

I've been working on the new portfolio to take to the SCBWI Summer Conference. Only a couple of weeks now. We're going to combine the Conference trip with visiting the Kwinn Clan down in LA, so time is getting tight as far as prepping for the conference. The boys are still home from school, though, so that complicates getting things done a bit.

 Though to be honest not getting work done with them around is a lot more fun than staying home.

Alameda County Fair

Anyway, I posted about my portfolio angst over in Sketcharound, so this year I'm trying to pull together a photographic portfolio rather than an illustration based one. It feels weird, to be honest. I have a lot of different portfolios that have been pulled together over the years, for different kinds of illustration work mostly. At least when I do an illustration portfolio I feel like I know basically what I'm doing. And I've pulled together photo based portfolios before, but they were for very specific markets (like getting kids' portrait work). This one is a bit looser, because I want to create a mood more than anything, hint at storytelling with the images. Telling a story is harder with photographs than illustrations for me, I think, since my photographs are basically capturing real moments rather than staged things, whereas with an illustration you can try to shoehorn a bunch of relevant storytelling elements into a picture and then move them around to still have a good composition etc. Since you're making it up you can include what you need. Photos like mine, not so much, so it becomes more dependent on implying things. Anyway, I've been combing through the files for likely images.

And it's fun to rediscover stuff I took a while ago and had put aside or forgotten or just not used for one reason or another. Some images have surprising longevity, though:

This one has been used a lot by the Monterey Bay Aquarium for their various promotional materials; they just sent me a very pretty new photo book about the Aquarium that includes this image above, which is really nice. :)

If I blow this up and split it into two full pages it looks like a storybook page...

Anyway, off to pick up Casey from gymnastics and then to the Post Office to mail off some Etsy goodies. A lovely lady bought one of my paintings!