Book Update and Illustrating Scenes
Friends, I am so excited to say that I am close to being done with my next children’s book! But I am also very nervous, because that means I actually have to start sending it out for other people to read, and even worse… critique. In the next couple weeks, I will share a few sketches and maybe even some complete illustrations that I will be submitting along with the manuscript. So keep checking back here!
For now I’ll say this: the story is about a fairy named Lucy. I’ve gone back and forth with the idea of a fairy as my main character. Have fairies been overdone? Is this too much like Tinkerbell? But there is just something so appealing to me about fairies, and this character in particular being a fairy, that I just couldn’t have her be anything else. I hope that when you read the book, you’ll agree with me that she couldn’t have been anything else.
And now I will leave you with a few scenes that I have illustrated, mostly for practice in drawing full-page spreads. Thank you for joining me on this journey!
Amy's New Puppy
I self-published my first book, Amy’s New Puppy, in 2015 and just scribbled together some illustrations. I decided to update a few of the illustrations to see how different they would be if I published the book now and below are the results. If you’d like to see process videos of the updated illustrations, I saved them to my highlights on my Instagram account.
pink hair, don't care
These are some of my recent illustrations. I am playing around with movement and body shapes. And of course pink hair.
I found it interesting while drawing these that my adult women have small heads and big legs, but in order to draw children, you do the opposite!
you are beautiful with God's beauty
From now on, I think we should greet each other every morning with how Gabriel greeted Mary in Luke 1:28 (The Message):
Good morning!
You're beautiful with God's beauty,
Beautiful inside and out!
God be with you.
Reflections on Lament
“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11
During Lent this year, our church* has been gathering together (via Zoom) to “practice lament”. This is an intimidating idea to most people: gathering with others with the sole purpose of being sad together. (Letting ourselves be sad when we’re alone is scary enough!) It sounds completely outside our comfort zones and honestly, maybe, rather pointless. Why should we just take time to be sad? And why magnify the sadness by hearing about everyone else’s?
But surprisingly that’s not what happens. The sadness doesn’t feel magnified. And suddenly we don’t feel so alone.
I am not a pastor or a leader of these groups. I am a participant, and in speaking to other participants I’ve heard things like “I feel so heard”, “I feel so connected to the community”, “I feel hopeful and safe here.” To hear these statements, a year after the world fell apart, and during/after a gathering on lament, is absolutely profound.
Our pastor often talks about lament being God’s good gift to us in our healing journey. “Lament”, as opposed to just “sadness”, is offering up our sadness to God. And I would add we offer up our sadness to God in expectation - we want to know what He is going to do about it! Sometimes we get an answer, sometimes we don’t. But it is the process, not the answer, that is important.
I can’t help but think of the Pixar movie, Inside Out.** Joy spends the whole movie trying to keep Sadness away from the control board of Riley’s mind. Riley is even commended for her positive outlook, even when things are hard. But in the end, it isn’t Joy who saves the day. Joy finally realizes that the only path to healing Riley is by letting Sadness do her job and take control for a little while. Only when Riley is finally able to express her Sadness, Joy can reenter the picture. And at the end, there is a beautiful picture of Joy and Sadness, hand-in-hand on the control board of Riley’s mind, as Riley snuggles her parents.
What a stunning picture of Sadness and Joy, co-mingling in healing. The two often have to work together. There is no life without sadness because our world is broken. Unless we know how to find joy in and through sadness, we will have no hope.
We have to learn how to find the joy in the sadness.
I am constantly reminded of this scene when I “practice lament” with others at my church.
But what’s even better is that we as Christians are not alone with our sadness. Not only do we have each other, we have a God who weeps with us. And as we lift our sadness up to God in lament, He meets us right where we are.
So I am saying this to you and I am saying this to myself: please, please stop fearing sadness. It is scary to just let ourselves be sad, because what if it breaks us? What if we can’t ever be happy again? But offer your sadness to God and He will meet you in it.
He came down to earth and experienced suffering first-hand. This is the week we remember Jesus’ journey to the cross, the ultimate in suffering and sacrifice. Meet Him in this suffering. Let yourselves be sad, offer it up as lament, and He will set you on the path of healing to acceptance, to abundance, to joy, and ultimately, the path to Life.
*Church of the Apostles, Bridgeport, CT. Most of what is written here is what I’ve learned there. Except with less Pixar.
**Why do Pixar movies always make it into my blog posts? Let’s pretend it’s because I work with children - but it’s actually just because I think they are phenomenal! And full of good, deep lessons on life!
happy spring!
happy spring from me to you! this is a little portrait of my amazing and beautiful cousin Suzanne. Feel free to contact me for commissions!
I love walking in cemeteries.*
There are the days when you need to shut off the noise, and nothing does that like a walk in a cemetery. There is a reason for the expression “silent as the grave.”
Today in particular I need silence, so I leave my phone at home and walk to the nearby cemetery.
The first thing I notice is the sound of my footsteps. (If I had my phone, I wouldn’t have even noticed them.) The sound is a reminder that I am alive. And I will be alive until the moment I take my last breath. This sounds obvious, but sometimes I need this reminder. Amidst the anxiety of life and the treading water of purpose, I need to remember that whatever my surroundings, I am still alive. And because I am still alive, I am still called by God to live.
I glance at the names on each stone. I say the names in my head and hope in some small way this keeps their memory alive and honors them. I take note of the dates. I even find my eyes moistening when my brief calculations prove a child is buried here. I grieve for them. Sometimes I even pray for their souls, which I am not sure is theologically correct, but I still think it’s OK to do.
I like to think that even though I love the silence of a cemetery, it’s OK to bring my children once in a while and let them play among the stones. I imagine that every person buried there would love to hear children laughing and running and using every second to just live their precious lives. Children are good at teaching us how to do that. And there is no more profound example for me than children running in a cemetery.
Today I am thankful for my walk in the cemetery and the lessons I glean from it. I like to think the people buried there would be happy to know their bodily presence nestled in the ground can still play a part in instructing the living.
*This was written earlier in the pandemic. Reading it now, months later, I realize it sounds pretty morbid. I don’t mean it to be. I think we always need to be reminded to move forward and live abundantly, even if we aren’t depressed (but let’s be honest - the pandemic has brought many of us to varying levels of depression!).
The Cost of Beauty
In part 1 in my series on Beauty, I talked about how beauty needs a broader definition. I related it to finding beauty in myself, but also that it can apply to so many things in this world. Today, in part 2, I examine the cost of looking for (and finding!) that beauty.
I saw a picture on Instagram (@earthfocus) which led me to a conversation with my husband that jokingly started like this “I want to go to there”. It wasn’t too too far off, and going there actually became a distinct possibility. But the catch was, I wanted to go when the Christmas lights were still up, because I wanted it to look just like the picture. So we planned a trip to Quebec City in early January. The resulting trip and subsequent pictures were some of the most magical in my entire life. Even my dearly-loved husband, very much a non-romantic, told me the streets were “almost magical”. (Did my husband just say something was magical?? But he did, and it was.)
Whether we are visiting a uniquely beautiful place, staring at a beautiful painting, looking into the peaceful face of a sleeping child, hiking through a colorful woods, or even experiencing a lovely smell, emotions buried deep can come to the surface in an instant. Some things are universally considered beautiful. Some things are only beautiful to us. But either way, it doesn’t change the force of our reaction when we face something we find truly beautiful: something raw and real wells up inside. It shakes us and awakens us. It can be so evocative that we can feel things we haven’t felt before or feel them more deeply and richly than ever.
Sometimes our reaction can even feel painful. Sometimes tears come to our eyes and we want to cry. Our soul is crying out that this is what life is about, this is abundance, this is real and everything else is just a sad imitation.
But the moment doesn’t last.
My favorite quote by C.S. Lewis (in The Weight of Glory) sums it up so well:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
Our beautiful moment of raw and real emotion is gone all too soon. We can’t put it in our back pocket and pull it out whenever we want a piece. It is happenstance and ephemeral. It is that very fleeting nature of a beautiful moment that makes it so precious, but also so painful. We want to hold on to it forever.
There was a moment in the Pixar movie Soul when #22 (in Joe’s body) sat down and watched a seed fall to the ground. It wasn’t a big, dramatic moment. It wasn’t profoundly beautiful in the classic definition of the word. In fact, it was rather ordinary: a seed fell from a tree onto a city sidewalk. Someone else could have sat in the exact same spot and caught the exact same seed and felt nothing.
But to #22, it changed everything. It was just a moment, but it was the moment her soul came alive and she decided she wanted to really live.
My example of old Quebec City in January is a bit silly, but my point is that in order to catch that fleeting once-a-year beauty, we had to endure some of the coldest days we have every experienced. We had to hunt down something we knew to be beautiful, but the cost was frozen fingers and toes!
Sometimes the cost is just being cold. Sometimes it’s just taking a little time out of our day. Sometimes it’s that we look a little silly. But sometimes it’s allowing ourselves feel something real that may scare us, to allow ourselves to be changed, and to really live.
Beauty is all around us if we really take the time to look (especially if we remember to broaden its definition). Opening ourselves to its evocative nature may feel very vulnerable or make us feel exposed but it is the path of abundance.
And that is beautiful.
Beauty Needs a Broader Definition
Part 1 of a short blog series on Beauty
We have a very narrow definition of beauty.
Go ahead, take some time to think of things that are classically considered beautiful.
I bet your list looks something like:
Rainbows
Flowers
Sunsets
Colorful fall leaves
A mom and her baby
A handsome man or a beautiful woman
No doubt these are all beautiful things. But is there not also beauty in the rain before the rainbow?
My quest to find beauty everywhere has been lifelong, even before I knew how to express it. But never has the journey been harder than when I realized I had to look for it in myself, especially my physical self, though I had to apply this to my personality as well. It took a force of will and deep conviction to stop hating my body, to stop cursing my personality, and to start loving it.
And when I started loving who I am more, I realized that beauty for women is too narrowly defined. Isn’t it beautiful to have laugh lines? To have stretch marks? To have wrinkles?
Laugh lines show a life full of smiles and laughter; stretch marks show a body that grew and changed in different seasons, whether from great joy or sorrow or just normal everyday life; wrinkles can tell story after story of a life well lived. For me, and in particular, my weight gain, showed a happiness and contentment I have never experienced before. And isn’t that what is beautiful?
And if beauty for women is too narrowly defined, then maybe all beauty is too narrowly defined.
Rain
Weeds
Clouds
Naked trees
Grief
Imperfect bodies of all kinds
Nature and its ever changing and yet always the same cycle is beautiful. Change, dying in winter and rebirth in spring represent to us newness and excitement with each day and season, while also reassuring us with its consistency.
The tears of a grieving son, mother, friend are beautiful. They show the depth of emotion, of love, that is so raw and real - emotions that we so easily take for granted in our every day lives. It is the pain of grief that we have all felt, the pain that connects us together.
Humanity as real people, not as sex symbols or icons to idolize, is beautiful. Real people who have lived real lives, who have touched others, and their bodies that reflect the journey. Humanity in every form, not just one color, race, and shape, is part of the richness of who we are as people!
That is the broader definition of beauty that we need. That is beauty. And it can be found everywhere.
Valentine Victorian
Valentine Victorian.
I love Victorian houses and this one is all decked out for Valentine's Day! With the snow falling outside and the warm lights shining in all the windows, this house is inviting you in for some hot chocolate and cookies.
Shop my holiday collection.
Lifter of my Head
This is a name for God that feels life-saving to me.
It is for those whose body and soul are bent over, who are trudging through the mire, with tear stained faces, who carry heavy burdens, who are world weary. Those who are dragging one foot in front of the other, not knowing to where, never looking up.
And suddenly He appears. His very presence washes away the mud that surrounds feet. He gently puts his hand under my chin. He lifts my weary head. He looks into my tear-stained eyes. And finally, finally, hope fills my heart.
He looked at me with love. He drew me out of many waters. He delighted in me. Indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
And it all started when he lifted my head so I could keep my gaze on him.
Psalm 3:3. Psalm 18:16, 19. Psalm 16:6.
The Weirdness of Motherhood
Last night I had a not-too-unusual experience that perfectly encapsulates what a friend has recently called “the weirdness of motherhood”. I had never thought about how weird motherhood was until I heard that phrase and since then I’ve been recognizing it in everything!
At around 4am my son came to me crying about a spider in his bed. Agreeing with him that yes, that is indeed terrifying, but reassuring him that it was a dream, I encouraged him to go back to bed. (Actually it was more like “huh? Dream! Bed!”) But instead, he climbed into bed with us, and I was too tired to argue.
What happened next is a perfect example of the weirdness of motherhood. Let me paint you a picture.
Not shown in this little cartoon is that at one point, I was actually missing my daughter and wishing she would join us in the bed! And literally the next second - almost simultaneously even! - I was wishing my son was back in his bed and I could go to sleep. It’s like wanting to be thin and wanting to eat an entire tray of brownies at the same time! (Another oxymoron in my life.)
Whatever stage of motherhood we are in, we want them gone and we want them back. We want snuggles and we want our own space. We want to hold them forever, but we are training them to leave. So I suppose in the end, we have to concentrate on the good stuff and roll with the bad. I’m thankful that my son kept me up last night and I could capture a beautiful sleeping boy picture. But I’m also thankful he doesn’t do that most nights. I guess that’s the key: being thankful whatever the circumstances.
1 Thessalonians 5:18
This is not who you are.
Tonight I've been thinking about insecurities... we all have them, the challenge is to not let them define you. So I took a lesson from Moana tonight and drew up this little picture to share!
