The Always Team gets a sequel-- Trouble in Riderville goes for a TD

My most recent book-- and the latest Saskatchewan Roughrider book -- has rolled off the presses just in time for the annual Labour Classic Day CFL game, the much-loved duel between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (Sunday, September 4 at Mosaic Stadium in Regina).

In collaboration with author / journalist, Holly Preston, The Always Team: Trouble in Riderville, published by Always Books, hints at more suspense than readers may have found in the first story...

Everything was perfect in Riderville. At least it seemed that way.... until the day it wasn’t perfect at all.

One interesting aside... the first book, simply entitled The Always Team, has won the distinction of being the Riders' all time best-selling book.

I started working on Trouble in Riderville in the spring of 2011, and decided, along with Holly, to add more Regina landmarks to the sequel. As you can see from the cover, and a number of the full spreads, I needed to do some research as the look of the Regina skyline has changed considerably over the past few years.

Lots of reference pictures, especially from the perspective of Mosaic Stadium, were needed. We were both keen to include a scene of the boys walking across the Albert Street, where the reader could see the gorgeous and newly-refurbished pillars. (Some trivia here... did you know that the Albert Street bridge holds the Guiness Book of Worlds Records for the longest bridge over the shortest span of water... ? If you're from Regina, then I bet you did ...)

Here's my pen draft of this scene -- the final colour image that appears in the book is somewhat changed, however. We decided to include some Saskatchewan pirates, anchored in Wascana Lake, for some extra intrigue...

As for the neighbourhood where the boys live, I drew on my own memories of growing up in the 2900 block of Retallack Street in the leafy surrounds of Lakeview, where kids still play in the dappley shade of its tree-lined streets. I chose houses that were built in the 1920s because I love the stucco, the window frames, the interesting doorways, the mature foliage... the gestalt of the neighbourhood, the singularity and uniqueness of each home, where a sense of western Canadian history lingers.

I was reminded while creating the images for Trouble in Riderville of what a lovely city Regina is. If you harbour any doubt about the validity of this statement, then check out the blog called "Regina in Pictures: an online photoblog of one of Canada's most beautiful cities!," by a wonderful photographer named Guy D. There's one shot of a gentleman sitting lakeside at the south end of the Albert Street bridge in autumn-- it's absolutely stunning.

Anyway, it's back to the proverbial (and literal) drawing board for now...

Cheers!

Val

"The ALWAYS Team: Trouble in Riderville" is now available online at www.riderville.com.

A weekend at the Banff Teacher Institute

I've just returned from a revitalizing weekend at the magnificent Banff Centre for the Arts (the temperature was plus 1!), where I had an opportunity to facilitate a couple of workshops at the 6th annual Learning Through the Arts Banff Teacher Institute. There was lots of cross-pollination as LTTA artists and teachers from across Canada gathered in the mountains to share their arts-based ideas, innovations and experiences for the classroom.

My co-facilitator was Mar'ce Merrell, YA novelist extraordinaire, and together we tackled humanity mapping at the division 2 level. With Mar'ce at the writing helm, and me directing the visual art component, we and our class of teachers explored 19th century immigration to western Canada.

Our lead into the topic was the creation of a thaumatrope (see my December 1, 2009 post for details on this easy but effective optical device). We asked our students to devise an image based on some form of 19th century vehicle -- modes of transport that immigrants would have used to make their way to western Canada. Chinese and European immigrants would have come by sea to reach North America, while Afro-Americans would have come by land.

With some reference material on hand to sift through, students came up with images such... as a steam train on one side of the thaumatrope disk, and steam rising from its stack on the other side; a clipper ship hull on one side and the full set of sails on the other; a wagon train on one, with the seated driver on t'other.

Students drew them in pencil first and after lots of twirling and experimenting with the placement of objects on the second side, outlined their images in fine black Sharpies and coloured them in with pencil crayons.

My second visual arts project with our students was developing a short cartoon strip -- I provided a series of pre-drawn templates with 4 to 12 boxes, gave them a brief run-down on the basic elements to consider when creating a cartoon strip (panels, speech and thought bubbles, narrative devices, etc).

Based on Mar'ce's literary lead-in, in which she guided us through the first chapter of Shaun Tan's "The Arrival," students developed a short immigration story based on their own family history, or on the reference materials provided. Most chose to narrate from personal histories, and the results were wonderful and moving.

I like to use cartoon strips or graphic novels as my art form when I instruct because it covers lots of core scholastic territory -- literacy, fine arts, storytelling -- and I now realize that really any subject matter is a candidate for this art form.

It was one of my students (a French immersion teacher from southern Alberta), who showed me an example of four-panelled cartoon she's used to teach math in Grade 3. I quickly scribbled it up show I could post it here to show you ...

So simple, so effective, so, so, well, so Learning Through the Arts...!!

The Always Team is out in the world now, and less than 3 months after its debut, is very close to being sold out -- seems many people want a children's book about the Saskatchewan Roughriders (even if the 'Riders didn't take this year's Grey Cup back to Regina).

The day before the Grey Cup (November 27) was spent at the second annual Calgary Children's Book Fair and Conference, held at the Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Hall. It was a great turn out of participants and attendees.

The organizers of this wonderful event are YA novelist Simon Rose, children's writer Val Walker (of Hedley the Hedgehog fame), editor Pat Kozak, designer Nic Burman and me.

Next on my plate is a children's non-fiction picture book by author Judy Kirton-- title TBA. We're aiming for a spring 2011 delivery date. Fingers crossed!

Not much longer now... I've spent much of June and July working away on The Always Team, a children's book about the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Now, we await the final product to be printed (it's at Friesens in Manitoba), packaged up and delivered into our anxious little hands.

Holly Preston wrote the tale about a trio of Saskatchewan boys who love the 'Riders, and she brought me on-board to do the illustrations. It's been lots of fun (and a lot of work!). Here's a sample page to show you...

Most of the actual painting was done while I was on vacation with my family in Paris (I did all the line drawings while still in Calgary). We were very fortunate to have the use of a flat in the 16eme arrondisement for three weeks, where I was able to spread out all my painting stuff on the dining room table.

Each morning, before cafe and patisseries, I sat down and painted. You'll note that a great deal of green watercolour was used (Lukas 1171 & 1193, as I recall). Final touches were completed much closer to Mosaic Stadium, on a dining room table in Regina's south end.

Will let you all know when it's released!

Creating a Mandala with a class of kids

One of the moms at my daughter's school asked me if I had any arty ideas for a surprise year-end gift for our kids' very special grade 4 teacher.

The teacher (whom I'll call Mrs Clark 'cause that's her name) is a believer in the connectedness of life, and subscribes to the what-comes-around-goes-around principle. She's also the kind of person who'd love a drawing done on the back of a paper serviette just so long as it comes from the heart.

What could be done, we wondered, that would include each of the students, yet not be too taxing on the kids and their families? The work on this project would have to be done on the homefront without Mrs Clark's knowledge.

We settled on a mandala, which in Sanskrit means "essence" and "having or containing," a symbol representing the entire universe, "the self and inner harmony,"as well as translating to "completion." Perrrr-fect!

Creating a mandala required some geometric figuring and cyphering on my part. With 18 kids in the class, and 360 degrees in a circle, each piece of the pie would have to be ... uh, hang on ... 20 degrees per piece.

So, onto 18 separate sheets of Arches 90 lb hot-pressed paper, I drew a 20-degree piece of pie, along with the delineations I wanted the kids to make, and a place for their name (all would have been lost without this step...).

The other mom whom I'll call Charlotte ('cause that's her name), put together a secret little package of info for each kid to take home.

The package included this piece of pie (see right), a description of the project and what a mandala is, instructions to keep it SECRET, and an example of how they might colour their pie of the mandala (see below).

The toughest job was actually collecting the work from the kids without Mrs Clark knowing what was going on. This meant chasing kids down in the playground, e-mailing parents, peering into grubby backpacks, re-doing 20-degree pie pieces to no end, secret meetings, all in an effort to get the goods for the final piecing together of the mandala.

Once I had all the pieces collected, I used a larger piece of the Arches 90 lb paper, and glued them down to it, initially with a glue-stick. Then, I painted the entire surface with Modge Podge, being careful with the kids' art that was done in felt marker (for future reference, ask the kids to use only pencil crayon, no felts).

Then, it was off to the framers' who cut a matte that overlapped the circumference of the mandala by a spare 1/16 of a inch. I chose a bright white matte and a simple black frame. To the back of the framed mandala, we attached a legend so Mrs Clark could see which mandala piece belongs to which student (hence the usefulness of keeping kids and pie pieces straight from the get-go).

The result is, well, pretty spectacular... or at least, we think so...

Foothills Young Authors' Conference 2010

Another great Saturday spent with a couple of excited groups of Grades 4s and 5s, this time in High River, Alberta. The Foothills Young Authors' Conference is held annually at this time of year, and they always snag great keynote speakers. Thanks to all the organizers and sponsors of this event-- all the kids I talked to had a great time.

Kenneth Oppel came out from Toronto to attend this year's FYAC, and the line-up of kids wanting his autograph snaked back and forth around Centre Court at Highwood High School about half a dozen times. Some of the other great presenters I got a chance to rub shoulders with were Simon Rose, Hazel Hutchins, illustrator Derek Mah, BC writer John Wilson, Valerie Walker, Mar'ce Merrell, Donna MacNaughton and Jacqueline Guest.

My session was called The Art of the Picture Book, where I discussed how to tackle the job of illustrating a story-- the editing process, breaking copy into pages, pacing, page formatting, text placement, cover design, character consistency... all that good kind of stuff.

The kids' hands-on exercise was to illustrate a page based on copy borrowed from a scene in James Marshall's George and Martha (remember the one where George pours Martha's split-pea soup into his loafers?).

I put the copy up on the Smartboard, and let them go at it, reminding them that they had to plan for where the copy would sit on the page.

After they'd completed their illustrations, we compared and contrasted them with their classmates, and discussed their rationales. Most depicted George and Martha as humans, but there were also some aliens, dogs and amphibians.

I then showed them how Marshall had in fact depicted this scene, and since most kids (okay, none) weren't familiar with the story, none knew how he'd done it.

And none of them knew that the couple were hippos. Surprise!

See you all next year!

Sketch-Your-Pet at Monkeyshines Book Store

Another great day with a group of happy kids last weekend at one of Calgary's great independent bookstores -- Monkeyshines is the city's only kids-only bookstore.

Owner Sue Hill and I came up with the idea of holding a sketch-your-pet workshop (I do have some experience in the pet sketching department).

The poster advertising the event (see image at right) asked kids to bring in pictures of their favourite pets, which most did.

I was also ready with pictures of my own that kids could choose from -- I had at-hand a picture of bull dog, a beagle or two, a couple of cats, a ferret, a hamster, and a gerbil (sorry, no reptiles).

One girl had a picture of her pet hedgehog named Humphrey. I learned that Humphrey could only be handled with gloves on, and would only agree to being handled at nighttime. I didn't realize hedgehogs were so fussy -- they don't look it.

There were also horses, cats, dogs, and guinea pigs. Thankfully, no reptiles.

The workshop ran from 1 to 3 pm on a drop-in basis, and most of artists arrived right at 1 pm. I had drawing boards, cartridge paper, pencils and pencil crayons, and erasers. The bookstore has pillows, stools and a couple of chairs, and kids made themselves comfortable throughout the store. Overall, about 40 - 50 artists attended and some parents got into the act, too.

Sue brought out cookies and the day was made even better.

Thanks to everyone who turned out, and to everyone at Monkeyshines Books!

Val