Welcome 2012

Christmas and New Year's made for a VERY relaxing time away from the studio, and spending LOTS of time with my family made it one of the nicest holidays in years. Adam and I stayed four days at my parents house for Christmas and it felt like being a kid again. It was magical!

Even though the break allowed for many days away from my desk, I did make some time to wrap up open projects. I finally finished with the IRA (Independent Read-Alouds) Card project (shown here).

I also submitted sketches for the National Geographic edu project of The North Wind and The Sun---I haven't yet received feed back on these but I'm hoping they'll get approved.

Other than those things I worked on some personal projects including a painting for my mom (still in progress) as well as digitally archiving my family's home videos from my childhood (also still in progress).  This painting is my first ever water-soluble oil painting. In the past I've had adverse reactions to the fumes/solvents of conventional oils and have shied away from using them. But this kind hasn't made my glands swell at all and paints just like regular oil. It's awesome!

And yesterday I had the interesting and unexpected job of working as a "pick-up artist" for a fellow Tugeau 2 illustrator. (In fact, my favorite Tugeau 2 illustrator.) She was under an unmanageable time crunch and needed to hand off the project to a different illustrator for the final color. So I responded to the request and got paid (a flat fee with no commission---which means my agent didn't take a cut!) to color some charming illustrations drawn by Gaia Bordicchia. It was honestly very fun, relaxing, and helpful to understanding another artist's visual thinking (even if I was not using her exact style). In all, it was a worthwhile exercise. Deadlines can get crazy in the educational market---especially when projects get delayed and overlap with other projects. And the benefit of having an agent is that there's probably someone who can help in a worst-case scenario. I hope that I did her work justice, even though stylistically it's become a bit of a Gaia-Courtney hybrid. I'm sure it feels uneasy to pass on your sketch to another artist but I hope it helped her in the end--I do so very much admire her beautiful work.

In unrelated, non-art news, it seems my battle with the assumed Lyme-disease is likely far from over. After 4 months off of antibiotics, my symptoms have made a comeback. And while the body pain is virtually non existent compared to how it felt last year, the headaches have been hitting me pretty hard. I don't know what the future has in store but I'm hoping to work through it--for as long as it is in my power to do so. There's just no point in having a prolonged pity party about something that isn't going to go away anytime soon. My only choice is whether I want to sit on the couch in my pajamas every day wasting my life or to say FORGET THAT and get back to work. So I've chosen the latter.

I'm trying to keep my head up and continue to hope that there exists a time in future Courtney's life when Lyme disease is not a part of it...