I’ve moved over to blogger.com under my own domain name. Please visit me there for links to gallery, school visits and bio.
cynthianugent.com
Also new is a blog just for my new book Fred and Pete at the Beach.
My short-lived balloon of exhilaration over getting my new website up has been sadly punctured and my eyes are all blurry from trying to understand how to upload an updated one today. I’ve stopped before I got that nasty feeling I call computer malaise, when nothing works after hours of increasing desperation. I’ll have to write an email to the server support. (Faint hope.)
Life has been busy with my three book projects: My Bully (Fitzhenry), Kiddo (Tradewind Books), and the Ducks of Nitobe Garden (Simply Read), as well as prepping my new course offering on Chapter books.
I’ve been invited to talk to 9-12 year olds at the Squamish Library on August 13, 3-4pm on graphic fiction so I’m working on a fun, interactive hour. I’m taking young Emma with me and will deposit her with Country Ranch for an afternoon of galloping through forest hunting moose and bears. Here she is with her latest kill.
Emma my yorkshire terrier with her teddy - a love-hate relationship
Little purple monster from the juvenile graphic novel
Music really has been my prescription for happiness in my middle age.
Handwritten 2nd draft of The Magic Bike
Langara’s website now has the Fall courses up. I’ve changed the Writing for Children I and II courses that I inherited from Luanne Armstrong to Writing for Children – The Picture Book, and the 2nd course is now for readers and writers called The Chapter Book. I’ve linked the Langara website page to this post.
Had a great afternoon presenting the illustrator’s pov at Susan Juby’s UBC creative writing course. I am a huge fan of Susan’s work and am so pleased to be asked back to her class.
Work is very scattered these days and I’ve had to reschedule a few things. My deadline for the first draft of my chapter book Kiddo with Tradewinds has been moved from August 1 to December 1. My new deadline for finished art for My Bully (Fitzhenry) is August 30 (Yikes!!!!). And my deadline for cover and 2 finished spreads for The Ducks of Nitobe Garden (Simply Read) is mid September. I hope I can manage it.
Am taking a fantastic swing guitar course with Rosemary Campbell and the Moveable Music School. She’s a wonderful musician, composer, teacher, and creator of the Moveable Music School and BC Swing Workshop. Feel a little pressured because she’s suggested I bring my trumpet and play a solo with the guitar class on Take the A Train. I’m not very confident about my trumpet playing and have recently quit the community band because I was getting into a bit of a rut with that group after 8 or so years. so am only playing trumpet at home. Am sad not to be going to BC SWing workshop this August but deadlines and bills have to take precedence this summmer.
Finally, at long last, after reading and reading and taking 3 workshops and spending endless fruitless hours on the computer, I have gotten a new webpage made in iweb onto my nugentart.com website and the reason for that is two wonderful bloggers who explained that you can upload your iweb site up to one OTHER than dotMac and described clearly how to personalize the iweb templates. these are Miss Cupcake and An Excited Bride – both geniuses in my opinion. Plus enormously generous in taking the time to blog so instructively about it.
Had a wonderful time giving two presentations to the delightful students of Quesnel School district at their Red Cedar celebration. The students there put in their votes and decided that the best novel of the Red Cedar shortlist is Flower by Irene Watts
Irene is a friend and colleague of mine and I know she will be pleased.
After a great morning I was taken to lunch by teacher librarians Daniela and Joyce and Grade 6 & 7 students Jenna, Janelle, Allison, Emily, Darian, Taya, Katie and Michaela. The librarians gave me a book about Nazko, where as a teen nearly 40 years ago I visited the lovely Piltz ranch. The students were incredibly smart and sweet. I had a lovely time and got lots of hugs. Unfortunately, my camera died after taking a single photo of my hotel and I don’t have any snaps to post.
My 2008 website for children’s book illustration and writing, teaching, art sales, rental and reproduction is located here while I learn how to use Dreamweaver. My old www.nugentart.com site is still up until I can figure out the intricacies of Dreamweaver, ftp and domain transfer and put up a new and improved one. The current nugentart.com site, while out of date and built with obsolete software I borrowed from the Vancouver Public Library, is the url listed in my picture books so must slog up the learning curve to update that one.
After taking two workshops on Dreamweaver at Langara, I think I’m going to like the program because I now know it can be used to create simple websites but can get infinitely more sophisticated as you learn more. I’m now working my way through Dreamweaver 8 for Dummies. Like most of the other for Dummies books, it’s in plain language and is a very good book compared to other jargon-loaded texts, but it will take me a while to read through it. So, after taking off my glasses and rubbing my eyes, I decided to give the built-in Mac iweb a try just to have something up there. I’m using the 60-day free trial. The new website I’ve created with iweb is just one page with a lot of links to other sites that have my art, profile, blog etc., instead of duplicating all that material onto the website. For instance, I have a link called Gallery which goes to my flickr account where I’m in the process of uploading images of my art. This way I can change my site all the time with one new piece of art or even a little video demo.
Brett Helquist’s site is one I’m full of admiration for. It’s amazingly minimalist with nothing but one big image and his agent’s phone number. Every time you go there you get one of 4 rotating images. What chutzpah!
Just got another request to do three presentations at a school in Surrey and realized I STILL haven’t updated my website which lists my old fees. Last year I raised them to bring them more in line with the CWILL BC and Canada Council recommendation which is $250/presentation. So now I’m charging a flat $200/presentation plus gst, plus travel costs. I’m off to Quesnel on May 8th to give two presentations at their Red Cedar celebration which I’m really looking forward to as I used to visit the lovely Pilz family in Nazko when I was a teenager.
Just finished the roughs for the Ducks of Nitobe Garden which I wrote and am illustrating. Needed to get them approved toot sweet as my beloved designer, Elisa Gutierrez will be having her 2nd child in June and will be away from her computer for some months to dote on the new baby. Also the season for the garden has just started and I would like to go there and paint for the book every week through the changing of the seasons. So far, the publisher likes what I’ve done, but we will change and tweak as it goes along. I need to have 3 finished illustrations and a cover by September. We want to launch the book at the 2009 Cherry Blossom festival next April. I am very pleased to be finally doing this book which I’ve been mulling for some time.
I was frustrated when I received the sad news that Raincoast books was closing its publishing arm and cancelling the contract for the book I wrote and am illustrating called Fred and Pete. It is incredibly difficult to send manuscripts to publishers these days as most of them do not receive unsolicited manuscripts, so you must figure out if you can finagle some kind of connection. So Fred and Pete are currently looking for a home. I’ve posted the sample illustrations on flickr.