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Author, Illustrator, Creative Guy willstrong.art@gmail.com

Sunday, June 14, 2009

BYU Writing and Illustrating For Young Readers Conference

Last week I attended the BYU WIFYR (Writing and Illustrating For Young Readers) Conference.  It was fantastic.



The conference runs for a week and it is intense.  I took the weeklong workshop with Dandi Mackall who is a prolific author.  We workshopped picture book manuscripts in a 15 person group each morning from 8:30-12:30 Mon - Fri.  I learned a ton from Dandi, especially about Point of View and getting in the character's head.  Dandi's website can be found here.  She's got some great books.  I'll make some recommendations on good books later.  (Also, Dandi is a sweetheart.)

I got to talk to Martha Mihalick, an editor from Greenwillow Books (an imprint of Harper Collins.)  She gave me some great feedback on a book dummy I'm working on.  She was great.  She helped me fix some big problems with the story and get it more focussed.

The conference is organized by two local authors (as far as I know) who are hilarious and make the whole thing a lot of fun.  They are Carol Lynch Williams and Cheri Pray Earl.  They are great and their books are great too.

If anybody is considering going into children's lit, either writing or illustrating, the BYU WIFYR conference is an invaluable resource of information and a great place to make connections.

At the end of the week I drew Will Terry (one of the presenters) as a lumberjack.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

100 Picture Challenge, Day 14: Silence

A silent comic that still manages to have dialogue.  I make no apologies for the less than tasteful joke; this is how I heard it when I was a kid.

Monday, June 8, 2009

100 Picture Challenge, Day 13: Misfortune

I do 'em when I can.  I might get back on schedule with one image per day but not for a few weeks yet I imagine.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Work (for Reals)

Yeah, I have legit illustration work (that pays real money.)  Here is a taste of the kind of thing I'm doing.  This book will teach about action words and the proper way to deal with monster attacks: dance like you mean it.  The big blank spaces are for Chinese text.









When I get some of these pages together in color and with Chinese text in place I'll post them.