When I was a little girl I loved the Peanuts Comic Strip. I lived and breathed Snoopy everyday and carefully cut out the daily strip in the newspaper and glued it into the pages of a lined loose leaf notebook. I would practice drawing him in school when I was sure the teacher wasn’t looking and then I would turn around and sell one of my drawings to a classmate for five cents. Hey, back then that was the cost of a candy bar! I loved to ride my bike, make forts, walk up to the local five and dime at my grandparents’ home and buy comics, chew bubblegum, and covet stickers. I still have a few of those stickers from cereal boxes of Frosted Flakes I hoarded. Hey, they glowed in the dark!

But I digress…

I eventually grew up and went to art school. I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and majored in animation. Those days animation wasn’t such a great career choice because it was long before computers and whatnot. But it turned out to be a good choice eventually because all that good stuff we take for granted finally got invented and thus I was right on time! So for a while after school I struggled a lot, and found whatever work I could in Boston ( a few commercials), then New York (working for Michael Sporn and making half-hour films for HBO and PBS from classic children’s books which I loved), but eventually I landed in Los Angeles and one of my very first jobs was the opportunity to work at Bill Melendez Studio on…A PEANUTS SPECIAL! It was called “Snoopy’s Reunion” and I was in heaven for a short bit and so amazed that the animations I so loved as a child I was now drawing myself. WOW. One of the highlights of my career and so cyclical. Sweet!

I worked at a lot of the major studios in feature animation and my career in animation spanned a total of sixteen years. I decided to quit however because I wanted to be more creative with my own art and not just copying the work of others. So I left Warner Bros. Features in 1997 and decided to go my own way. It took me two years, but I finally broke into the world of children’s publishing and it was all thanks to a dream. Yep. That’s right. After drawing with a thick and thin line for the animation business and trying to find my own style and not having much success; one night I was fast asleep and I was immediately awoken by a very loud, very booming voice that shouted right into my ear.

“DO COLLAGE!” it yelled and it woke me right up out of bed; because it was loud and it was deep and it was startling!

It took me a year to trust this voice; but eventually I made a postcard with some snowmen on it and set it out to art directors and weirdly as soon as I did just that; the phone started ringing. I have since had many other otherworldly experiences like that…I guess I should write a book! lol perhaps I am. 😉

At any rate, now that my son is graduating from high school; I now have the time and energy to focus on making books again (I really wanted to be the best mom I could possibly be for all his years growing up and thus I focused on other important aspects of my life).

I have studied photoshop and have learned how to take my cut-paper technique into the digital world now and am very excited at all the possibilities and ease that working digitally can provide. I work on a large Cintiq, where I can draw directly on the surface of the computer screen; just like as if it was a piece of paper. Instead of a scissor and some glue; I have a set of tools on my screen that allows me to “paint” with scanned in paper textures. I try to make my work look the way it used to because I don’t want to get woken up again in the middle of the night by a voice telling me I’m doing it wrong. Certainly not!!! LOL

I like the fact that now my art can be fixed easily, that no trees were harmed in the making of my art, that I don’t have to worry about running out of a certain type of paper, that I no longer need a lot of space to do my art, and that it actually goes a lot quicker than it used to so I don’t have to be cooped up inside all day. But most of all, it’s still FUN to DO! And it’s never too late to learn!