sketch day 2

People using the computer is another setting where it's easy to draw (and uh...we see far too much of this at our house).



That and people stalling for bed:


Images copyright Rose Green

You will notice that neither one of these includes a frontal face view. When you draw from a picture, you can often get distracted with getting the face just right, and forget that a person shows character in all of their body movements, not just the face. (This is especially true when the photo is posed.) Think of little babies. While they can vary quite a bit in size and features, it is nevertheless easy to tell what age a baby is by their body language/proportions. The way their oversized heads loll when they're looking at something with clumsy fingers totally identifies them and gives them a sense of motion and permanence. (Someone who is particularly good at this is Helen Oxenbury.) Forgetting about body motion in drawing people is like describing things only in terms of sight and neglecting all of the other senses when you're writing.


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Older books

I'm taking a day off from writing--I feel like I need to fill the well and really gear up to write the climax chapter (not to mention being three nights' short of sleep thanks to a child with a restless cold). What I really need to do is take a long walk in Spring, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, when I don't have as many scheduled events. In the meantime, I'm reading. Right now it's rereading Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. This is an old book. It won a Newbery Honor in like 1975. But it doesn't feel old to me. Actually, it succeeds so very well in connecting to the reader in a current way--even though it takes place in 1558, you know that the characters feel modern--because after all, don't we all feel modern and current? Even though some day, we'll be ancient history and funny clothes/hairstyles to someone else? It's a Tam Lin retelling, with "modern" characters set against a foil of dwindling Druids, who feel, in comparison, old-fashioned. And it does a great job of putting you in the moment, slipping you into the story and letting you forget that it is a story. I must confess (and this is personal taste, not any kind of commentary on what is Great Literature) that I much prefer books heavy on real-time action, ones that put the reader straight in the story. I'm not so much for books that create distance with frames and author-to-reader commentary (I'm good with Narnia, but anything more than that is too much for me). Likewise, too much fairy-tale "telling" (vs. showing), too many reminders that I'm reading a story, are distracting to me. So I really like this book because it feels alive to me.

Another book I'm reading aloud right now is probably out of print (ETA: originally published in 1946 by Doubleday, released in paperback by Scholastic in the 50s, and now again in print by the author's estate), but is still very well written: The Lion's Paw, by Robb White. It's WWII, and Penny and Nick (ages 12 and 9) run away from a Florida orphanage with a boy named Ben (15). Ben's dad is missing from the Navy, presumed dead, and his Uncle Pete wants to sell his father's yacht. But Ben doesn't think his dad is dead; in fact, he believes that once he completes the shell collection they've been working on together by finding a rare lion's paw shell, his dad will come back. And so they set off, with the Navy, Coast Guard, merchant marine, and Uncle Pete after them. The book is just really well-written. The language is crisp, specific; you know that Robb White knows boats, he knows the swampy Florida coast, the alligators, the oaks and Spanish moss. Despite the chase premise, it never feels over the top, never Hollywood exaggeration. The sense of the characters is solid, like they are real people, and the relationship between the three is warm and inviting. And White never cuts them any slack. What they do is in the realm of believability, but it's hard. He works those characters to their limits--much more than they think they can do. My hands hurt at the end of one chapter of rowing in the rain. This is an excellent book that well deserves to live on.

What about you? Any old favorites you'd care to recommend?