(no subject)
TIRED. And I've still got a little less than three hours left. And someone's eaten all the good chocolate in the bowl so I'm down to Hershey's. Blech.
The reason for the tiredness is that I got up at 5 am this morning to see mom off at the airport. She's en route to Germany now, and we're left to fend for ourselves in the first time since...well forever really. She never leaves. This might be why I needed to get out of that house so much. It's too lived in. I'll be helping out Jan and Dad a good bit I predict. I shudder to think what they'll eat otherwise. Mom tells them to do everything, so I have a good guess of what will happen with her gone.
On Monday Julie and I went to listen to Scott Westerfeld at Changing Hands. He wrote the Uglies Series and just finished up a trilogy of steampunk novels. He was a great speaker and gave a fascinating lecture on the disappearance of illustrations in books for teens and adults. Cause they used to have them! Remember those cool old classic books? They all had illustrations! This was because there was a huge pool of illustrators to draw (hehe) from. Illustrators were needed for everything from sears roebuck catalogs to newspapers, because there were no cameras. So illustrators were happy to take a break from drawing phonographs and draw, well, aliens from Mars. Then the camera came along (he showed us an illustration of a camera "so early, they had to draw a picture of it") and replaced the need for so many illustrators. With the lessening of demand came a lessening of supply and fewer people became illustrators. (I wonder if the rise of comic books had something to do with this as well) Anyway, with fewer illustrators, they were more expensive and only children's books started getting illustrations. But that's not what they told us when we were kids, was it? No - They told us we needed to use our imaginations! (Again, I'm thinking about comic books and how people consider them not real "literature." I wish I'd thought to ask him about that.)
Illustrators used to be extremely popular. More popular than the writers at times and often extremely influential. What's the iconic thing that comes to mind when you think of Sherlock Holmes? The hat. The deerstalker was a ridiculous hat for Holmes to wear - it was for the country (apparently, people actually stalked deer in them...I'm not sure how they helped) and Holmes HATED the country. But The illustrator, Sidney Paget, lived in the country and wore that hat (deer beware) and he drew it on Holmes.
He showed us this poster, which Julie now wants for her room:
In which the illustrator Alvin Correa is actually more famous than the author.
All of this was very cool. He got on the subject because Uglies, which was not illustrated in the original version, was illustrated when it was translated into Japanese. And all of his non-japanese fans were upset they didn't get any pictures. Apparently almost all books regardless of age level get pictures. (They also have a much more mainstream graphic tradition - manga. This is starting to sound like a thesis for a paper) So he started researching and What I've just explained is what he found out.
So as he was writing Leviathan, his steampunk series, he decided it would be cool to have illustrations. It takes place at a time when illustrations were still prevalent and pictures of steampunk stuff are cool. He found a really awesome artist named Keith Thompson who drew cool things like this:
And he ended up actually influencing what Scott wrote because of the things he drew.
So yes. Yay PICTURES.
This was all really fun to learn since I'm going to do my author study on Cornelia Funke, who began writing books simply so she could illustrate them, have grown tired of illustrating books in which children played in a schoolyard. She wanted to draw DRAGONS. And she wrote a book so she could.
The reason for the tiredness is that I got up at 5 am this morning to see mom off at the airport. She's en route to Germany now, and we're left to fend for ourselves in the first time since...well forever really. She never leaves. This might be why I needed to get out of that house so much. It's too lived in. I'll be helping out Jan and Dad a good bit I predict. I shudder to think what they'll eat otherwise. Mom tells them to do everything, so I have a good guess of what will happen with her gone.
On Monday Julie and I went to listen to Scott Westerfeld at Changing Hands. He wrote the Uglies Series and just finished up a trilogy of steampunk novels. He was a great speaker and gave a fascinating lecture on the disappearance of illustrations in books for teens and adults. Cause they used to have them! Remember those cool old classic books? They all had illustrations! This was because there was a huge pool of illustrators to draw (hehe) from. Illustrators were needed for everything from sears roebuck catalogs to newspapers, because there were no cameras. So illustrators were happy to take a break from drawing phonographs and draw, well, aliens from Mars. Then the camera came along (he showed us an illustration of a camera "so early, they had to draw a picture of it") and replaced the need for so many illustrators. With the lessening of demand came a lessening of supply and fewer people became illustrators. (I wonder if the rise of comic books had something to do with this as well) Anyway, with fewer illustrators, they were more expensive and only children's books started getting illustrations. But that's not what they told us when we were kids, was it? No - They told us we needed to use our imaginations! (Again, I'm thinking about comic books and how people consider them not real "literature." I wish I'd thought to ask him about that.)
Illustrators used to be extremely popular. More popular than the writers at times and often extremely influential. What's the iconic thing that comes to mind when you think of Sherlock Holmes? The hat. The deerstalker was a ridiculous hat for Holmes to wear - it was for the country (apparently, people actually stalked deer in them...I'm not sure how they helped) and Holmes HATED the country. But The illustrator, Sidney Paget, lived in the country and wore that hat (deer beware) and he drew it on Holmes.
He showed us this poster, which Julie now wants for her room:
In which the illustrator Alvin Correa is actually more famous than the author.
All of this was very cool. He got on the subject because Uglies, which was not illustrated in the original version, was illustrated when it was translated into Japanese. And all of his non-japanese fans were upset they didn't get any pictures. Apparently almost all books regardless of age level get pictures. (They also have a much more mainstream graphic tradition - manga. This is starting to sound like a thesis for a paper) So he started researching and What I've just explained is what he found out.
So as he was writing Leviathan, his steampunk series, he decided it would be cool to have illustrations. It takes place at a time when illustrations were still prevalent and pictures of steampunk stuff are cool. He found a really awesome artist named Keith Thompson who drew cool things like this:
And he ended up actually influencing what Scott wrote because of the things he drew.
So yes. Yay PICTURES.
This was all really fun to learn since I'm going to do my author study on Cornelia Funke, who began writing books simply so she could illustrate them, have grown tired of illustrating books in which children played in a schoolyard. She wanted to draw DRAGONS. And she wrote a book so she could.