The Elements of Illustration*

I critique hundreds of pieces every year. Not because I’m a Creative Director (although I have been), but because I (like you) am a consumer of art – of illustration, painting, comics, games, et alia. And the act of critique is one of the most helpful for enlarging one’s own understanding and formalizing concepts that might otherwise float away….

While the following list is by no means scientific (many of the elements listed below overlay others, and many great paintings use only a few) I made it for my own reference and I hope that you may find it useful food for thought. Please print it out and put it by your drafting table or computer if it’ll help.

Focus
Where do you want your viewer’s eye to go? What’s the heart of the piece, the crux of the biscuit?

Narrative
Is there a story here? A big idea? A paradigm, a parody, a pastiche? Has the sword been nicked in battle, has the dog been fed, has the sweater been patched? Norman Rockwell began his pictures thinking of a soldier under a light post and ran scenarios in his mind (often switching “lead” characters) until he found a painting.

A stunning piece from Swedish artist Anders Zorn

Composition and Design
Create a visual hierarchy – A path for the viewer to follow? Something fractal? Separate elements intended for book cover, spine and back cover? Consider the surface you’re working on, its aspect ratio and how that effects the harmonies and tensions of your piece. When working in a tall oval, or a wide ceiling, or a strange milled form, that’s pretty obvious. But it is just as important within a normal rectangle.

Palette
There are many good ones that great painters have applied over the years. Use one of theirs or make your own!

Value
Can your piece be reduced to black and white and still read correctly?
Sometimes good pieces work their value in terms of warm and cool colors, but most need strong tonal variety to read well.

A little-known satyric illustration by Kewpie Doll creator Rose O'Neill

Mass
Think Rodin, JC Leyendecker or Rose O’Neill.

Texture
It makes things and people seem real.

Symbolism
Personal, classical, mystical or cultural – words, numbers, objects, beings. There’s no shortage of sources or end to interpretation. While there was an entire movement of Symbolists (only some of whom were painters),  Michael Kaluta and Brian Despain are excellent modern examplars.

Synecdoche  (Micro defining Macro)
A small area of tight or implied detail will help define vast shapes – like the windows in a colossal building or the wrinkles on an elephant. One needs only a few wee bits to represent a larger whole.

Ornament
Whether it’s Mary Engelbreit‘s checkerboards, or Stephen Hickman‘s ornate orientalism, Ornament matters. Sometimes it’s a sort of texture, other times the whole raison d’etre.

Juxtaposition
Comparisons and contrasts of size, scope, meaning, characters… in our world of Zoroastrian black and white contrasts, this is often too-easy. Use discretion and variety

3 of Glen Orbik’s spectacular pulp covers

Stylization
Sometimes it’s fetishism for a type of brush-stroke or color scheme, sometimes caricature or anatomy. For example, the best pin-ups (by Gil Elvgren, Aly Fell, Glen Orbik, et alia) have similarly stylized elements, some of which might surprise you.
If you’re working on a pin-up, just crack their code and you’re off to the races.

Character
Have the characters lived real lives? Are they real beings with hopes and fears? Body language, gesture and costume are crucial here.

Tension
Gesture is important, but so is the feeling of tension. Sometimes it’s the most important part of a piece. Drama, high stakes, suspense. If you can enlist the viewer’s sympathy support or curiosity, you win.

Line
It’s quite obvious in the works of Franklin Booth, Aubrey Beardsley, and Mike Mignola – but don’t underestimate its importance for Drew Struzan, Arthur Rackham or John Jude Palencar.

Research/Reference
I know precious few people who draw brilliantly out of their heads, but those heads have absorbed the lessons their eyes have shown them for many years. Most of us have been nowhere near as observant, and while we may remember and be able to imagine many things, there are usually areas where we fall down. Bolster yourself and your work with reference. Don’t stick slavishly to it, but make it do your bidding.

Vignette
The play of shape (whether silhouette or fully rendered form) against a white, colour, or fully realized background is so important for keeping a viewer interested. It can be akin what designers call negative space.

Perspective
Each point in perspective applies to a single dimension (in 2 point perspective the points are nearly always width and depth). Get perspective right and you’ll be halfway home. Also, the more you keep you POV away from a normal grid as seen from a height of 6 feet, the more dynamic your piece is likely to be.

FUN!
A certain joie de vivre is key. It doesn’t matter if you paint supplely or with technical perfection – If you don’t bring some fun and adventure to your work, viewers can tell. They won’t always know what’s wrong, but they’ll get that something is…

To which list the delightful Kurt Huggins suggested:

Process: This is your way of managing and editing all of these different elements. Each step of your process should be about solidifying one more element of the image, building up to a final piece. There are many processes, and many ways to finish, but I think most processes start with idea or composition.

*And while I find that this list applies to my own artwork, I also find that much of it applies to my writing, sculpture, et al. Your mileage may vary.

© 2008 Lee Moyer.

Starstruck!

Starstruck was ahead of its time in 1980, and it’s still ahead of its time. The difference is it’s now being posted online (and of course there are hundreds more pages each lovingly painted by yours truly over the inspired inkwork of Mssr. Michael Kaluta). GO READ IT HERE. And while you’re reading it, look around. If you cast a clever eye, you’re bound to find me lurking in the shadows.

I first encountered it at the ABA convention in DC. The Marvel Comics reps were tearing down, and there was no way they wanted to schlep books home. So I kindly volunteered to take the Starstruck Graphic Novel (#13!) off their hands. Reading it was my introduction to Anarchera and adult storytelling. Here was a comic that took advantage of the form, and as a student of narrative I could not but be impressed.

I’d been fortunate enough to work with Mw Kaluta on this video for the Alan Parson’s Project:

I was familiar with his work from that and his remarkable covers for Madame Xanadu, et al., but Starstruck was a revelation. It was all manner of good put together in ways unthinkable to anyone but Elaine Lee and Mike Kaluta working together on a plane never before imagined. It’s not got neither the 80′s dystopian bells and whistles of Dark Knight, or the OCD completeness of Watchmen. Instead it has life. I can only imagine what Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby might have thought!

A properly thoughtful take on its wonders by John Hilgart can be found on The Comics Journal site.

A particularly inspired section reads thus: “Everything adds up, even if you cannot figure out what it might mean or where it’s headed. Starstruck’s reputation as a confusing book unfairly implies that it is a confused book, which it emphatically is not. History, culture, family relationships, religions, vernacular speech, and all manner of written texts from this fantastic world accumulate and intersect with perfect consistency”.

W. Andrew Shephard has another fine take in his review on The New Inquiry.

But I while I could show you pages of art and masses of critical acclaim, I will instead quote one random tiny part of the marvelous Glossary (also online). Here’s a snippet about the March Baptists:

“In the book of South Carolinians 1:35, Zed gives to his followers his famous 27 AMENDMENTS to the 10 COMMANDMENTS of Moses (Old Testament). The first seven of these are: 1) Thou shalt wear brown shoes, 2) Thou shalt purport thyself in commodious and seemly ways at all times, 3) Thou shalt talk louder than anyone else in the room, 4) Thou shalt leaveth thy door open by six inches and keep thy best foot on the floor at all times, 5) Thou shalt not be surprised by anything the Lord Thy Zed doeth unto thee, 6) Thou shalt button thy top button in the presence of thy neighbors, 7) Thou shalt March faithfully and without hesitation into the Heavens. The March Baptists took the Seventh Amendment quite literally. After the Unification, the March Baptists did more for the push into space than any other Amercadians. March Baptists researchers developed ships and weapons, March Baptist workers built them, wealthy March Baptists financed the work. They poured credits and human fodder into the new Amercadian Space Brigade. They were not among the first to go into space, however. During simulated flights it was found that non-Baptist crewmembers (the majority) developed a tendency to repeatedly bash the heads of the March Baptists into large metal objects after only a few marbecs’ confinement in the small (by our standards) ships. Only after they began to build and launch their own mission-ships were March Baptists able to realize their god’s commandment. As of this writing, the March Baptists have missions on 938 planets and free-floating temples EVERYWHERE.”

Over 30 years the story has appeared in small and teasing installments. And where some of those bits were in color, all were physically shorter – they were a different aspect ratio altogether – on intended for a magazine format. Some have never been seen in color before I painted them. So to round off this attempt to share one of my great loves (and two years of my work), here are a couple of befores and afters (and please note the new panels that the greater page height allows!):

Anatomy of a Murder*

The delightful MK Hobson’s first novel was The Native Star. It was a wonderful book and it was, accordingly, nominated for a Nebula award in the same year that two of Portland’s other great writers, Mary Robinette Kowal and Felicity Shoulders, were.

But when it came time for the second book, The Foreign Anodyne, things got dodgy. The book didn’t sell nearly as well, and who was to blame? Why the author of course! How could the “failure” of the second book be laid at any other doorstep?

Well, this post will present a small case study** of the two covers, and attempt to discover where it all went wrong. First, I’ll talk about why The Native Star‘s cover design worked.

The Intentional: Great font choices. The bold display font is wonderful – evocative of period and magical. Yummy. The smaller font is elegant and well placed – the whole piece flowing well from top left to bottom right.

The blurb is a statement using ‘love’ and ‘dangerous magic’.

The partial cameos on the left side seem to form hinges, and while the design is not holistic enough to wrap them around the spine, it looks from the front cover that they might.

The choice of stock art is good. The viewer does not understand what the true narrative is, but feels that there is one. Is the man in the foreground giving some woman a gift? Is she disrobing? Is she worried? Interested? We don’t know, but we have enough clues to conjecture ~ and that’s fun.

There is an distressed and torn texture overlaid on the picture. This serves to unite the disparate elements in a way that makes them properly “period”. Further, there are color complements in the form of the deep red notes on the largely weathered green cover. And a proper little touch of blue that completes the composition admirably.

The Accidental: The hand in this piece is supposed to be that of our heroine. The fact that it is the hand of a man, modified slightly at the author’s request, is, I believe, a net gain for the piece. It makes the viewer imposed narrative stronger, and more romantic. The rendering of the jewel in the hand is, if you’ll pardon the expression, ham-fisted. I can’t tell what it is really. I guessed a jewel, but with the rendering one would be as safe to think it’s a tunnel to another universe. And while I would personally hate to have created such a questionable form, I feel that it probably works better than a fully representative version would have. As a title, the words The Native Star are graphic and legible. The letterforms move and flow nicely, one to another. They look and feel nice.

In summation: This cover works and got enough readers in the door to make the book a success. Huzzah!

And now, book two ~ The Foreign Anodyne.

What? The Foreign Anodyne? But it says The Hidden Goddess I hear you cry!

Sadly, almost everything I praise the first cover for above is reversed with this cover. And that’s especially odd given its obvious similarities. How can an attempt to move all the elements from cover 1 to cover 2 be bad? Well, that’s why I’m writing about them. It’s so rare to see such a clear case of sequelitis. Where the book is a sequel, it is by no means a rewarmed version of The Native Star. But the cover is a badly reheated version of its cover.

What it gets right: It keeps the cameo hinges and the bold display font. But even those small victories might be Pyrrhic…

What it gets wrong: Everything. We might argue that The Hidden Goddess is a better title than the vastly more mysterious The Foreign Anodyne, but I’ll call it a draw. Until of course I consider the typography. Since we know that the font will remain the same, there’s no excuse for making the author change her title to something that will look repetitive and illegible ~ 4 Ds, 2 Ss, 2 Es, and a tall I and and O? In a font where Os and Ds look the same? And while the G is a bigger display cap, the rest of the word looks ODD. Or indeed ODDEST. A font that was brilliant when it read The Native Star looks… boring. If, however, it read “The Foreign Anodyne”, it would again look spectacular. No sets of double letters, and while you may not know what an Anodyne is, it would look so good that it might not matter. Is it fair to insist that this sort of design choice be considered and arranged? Yes. Is that how most publishing works? Certainly not.

What else is wrong? Well, the rest of it. No color contrast or complements. No mystery. No uniting texture to suggest age. The phrase “true love” combines with an image lovable only to hair fetishists and sellers of hair sticks to make a cover devoid of narrative. The highest contrast our human brains perceive is that of black and yellow, so the black and gold of The Native Star works a treat. There is no similar contrast on The Hidden Goddess. Seeing the background through the hinge cameos creates more interest there than a focused cover wants, and keeping said cameos the same green-gold color draws even more attention to them. The partial substitution of the smaller font, and it’s poor placement is similarly problematic. There is no flow, grace, narrative, mystery or focus to this cover. Hints of period are all well and good, but when the only image looks like an undisguised photo from a contemporary bridal magazine…. well, it’s bound to be a problem.

So, what’s the possible solution? Well, I am pleased to say that I’ll be doing Mary’s next two covers as she takes her writing directly to the people, without walking the curious labyrinth that is traditional publishing. She talks about that here:

http://www.demimonde.com/2012/01/21/so-whats-with-this-kickstarter-thing-youre-doing/

As usual, I’ll be putting my money where my big mouth is, and am fully prepared to be held to the same high standards I espouse so freely. And, as ever, I am interested in your thoughts.

Cheers!

Lee

* It turns out that it wasn’t murder per se. More an accidental suicide by the publisher….

**Humorously, Case Study is the name of the neighborhood coffee bar where of the writers I mention herein hang out and work.

The Wm. S. Burroughs Puppet Show

This site will come to contain multitudes – curious artefacts in pictures, prose, parody, pastiche and things man was not meant to know. We begin with a drawing from 1997 which led to stage piece I wrote 3+ years later.

I’m always curious to hear your thoughts and impressions.

THE WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS PUPPET SHOW

(lights up full)

3 weeks ago, the spirit of noted Beat Author William S. Burroughs came to me as I sat working at my desk. I was as surprised as anyone.

He told me he’d come back from the Western Lands to commission a worthy vessel for his spirit- a “Homonculus”.  Who was I to disagree? I’d never had a visitation before. And besides, I was pleased he liked my sculpture. Most people don’t even know I sculpt…

So I set to work- Needles, thread, cloth, felt, wax and a little human hair. I was building Burroughs a magical avatar which he would animate when I’d gotten the form just right. It was easier than it sounds. And he promised me two grand and some dirt on Ken Kesey. I actually believed him…. Even dead I figured, he has more connections than I do, and his books are still selling.

So… it was after 2 in the morning and I had finished the figure at last.
I was walking upstairs to sleep when I heard the basement door creak… open… slowly.

I ran back downstairs and found that the figure gone. All that was left on my work table was THIS- a single sheet of typewriter paper with a few hastily typed words…

So if you see an emaciated wax figure about 3 feet high, bald, dressed in a black suit and a dark felt fedora, tell him I’m looking for him. Bastard owes me money…

(Lights out. Spotlight up on Wm. S. Burroughs puppet stage left)

MY TRIP BACK FROM THE WESTERN LANDS

A tale in 3 parts by H. Bugjuice Lee.

Part 1: Cats.
Those crazy mewling puking cats. They showed me the way. Not at first. Later. After the entrails were finished and they were wiping their paws on what remained of my pantleg. Fuckers.

Part 2: The Dead Hand of Parody
His head came up just like a big bald son of a bitch.
I stood, reached into it, and squeezed its pustulent grey mass of congealed gravyboat pulp. It knew me then — The recognition of the killer returning to the scene of his crime — But before it could act — Gulp, I pulled it apart. I stretched a brittle grasping hand inside the glistening petals of viscous pancreas flesh, the gout and seep reminding me of Joan. The only trouble to shooting my wife through the head was that I could only do it once.

Ask anyone who was there. It was a hell of a shot- the dear sweet natural Junk to steady my aim. You should have been there, and after there, in the bug room. I saw things there — Little things — Specks of foam – Spittle – Gristle — Vile orange grit — Dirt shed from the crossroads — And caught in the gaping maw of memory were acts and encores that beggar description except for the fact that they were all true — Every Godforsaken one of them.

The plain of Mexico and the place of dead roads stretched out in varicose nostalgia from the Western Lands. The words- the God damned nuzzle of the virus. I should have stayed in Vienna with Benway. He knew the big stout fix. Why did I wait so long?

Part 3: This Word did not Exist.
The scorpion’s arm is waving — Waving in errant salute — Hello — Razorblade — Swop — Heat Engine — Goodbye — Our time on this ball of dung is past — So a salute to the rest of our twitching juicy body parts as the bug’s arm moves in spasm and swoon across the rough wooden floor — Other pieces shimmy and jerk, like the mirage of a shotgun shack — Like the fetal earthquake inside Joan’s decaying womb — Like the St. Vitus dance of wounded toys — Winding down forever.
Nothing is true.
Everything is remitted.

(blackout)

HOLLYWOOD* BOUND! • • • • Strange Tales of 2011

A DICKENS OF A YEAR

We often hear Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne at this time of year, but the most famous lines of his To a Mouse better tell the tale: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft agley”

Instead of moving into the guest cottage I was preparing, and then simply selling the huge house (maximizing value of the additional lot and bringing the sale price better into line with the neighborhood), at the eleventh hour I learned that the property must be sold undivided. If this year has lessons, the first might be “Don’t get too comfortable”. The second might be that loss and grief are under-rated, at least where adaptability and cunning can be brought to bear. I remain so grateful to the many people who’ve been so helpful in such difficult circumstances.

THE GREAT HOUSE

Selling the best house in my old St. Johns neighborhood was a challenge, and the timing was ghastly. Ian was a huge help in finishing the sleeping porch bathroom, and several other last minute projects, and I left this house as polished as the previous two. But where they had sold in a combined 36 hours, this house would take  4 months of opportunistic lowball offers, 2 price reductions and 3 fake-outs from the same inept and vacillating Wyoming couple. I finally found the woman who needed to own my house – or, more accurately, she found her house. Rene Denfeld, bestselling author, journalist and private investigator wasn’t even looking for a house when she found mine. But she quickly realized it was the home of her dreams, made a very strong offer in a weak market, sold her old house in Overlook on faith and prepared to move. But the very same banks that we American citizens bailed out a year earlier decided they couldn’t possibly loan her money – not even with a 70% downpayment! And of course the appraiser undervalued the house by 80k too. And code that was utterly ignored when we bought the house in ghastly condition was suddenly de rigueur now that the house was glorious. The system is becoming increasingly diabolical, and I caution any of you hoping to sell your home that you might be in for some rude surprises. And the more exceptional your abode, the worse your circumstances are likely to be…. With Rene’s help and forbearance, we finally got the deal done. But no lesser buyer would ever have persevered. I spent the entire morning of my move to Hollywood* at the City Planning Office. My brilliant German architect friend Rene Bernt had helped me draft plans so that the house could actually be sold. I cannot imagine the difficulties of the year being overcome without the wonderful Renes.

I later took Rene D. an antique oak mirror as a housewarming gift (I’d found upon moving into the house 8 years earlier and my father had restored to beauty. It belonged with the house). When I knocked on the door, the first sound I heard was the laughter of children upstairs. Rene has three wonderful foster children, one of whom declared the house “a mansion” upon her first visit. On my most recent visit Rene showed me the idyllic waterfall she had created in the back yard. The sound of water makes the back porch irresistible, and her landscaping skills complement all the work I (and my talented neighbors) did on the “mansion” over the previous 8 years.

FAMILY

In order to stage the house for sale, all the interstitial rugs had to be stored away. To keep the refinished floors safe, Lego went to stay temporarily with my folks. But that ended when my Dad’s multiple strokes and my Mom’s broken hip left him without any place to be. After that Lego was cared for by the wonderful Dan and Alison, and he played with their adorable black beast Reuben for a couple weeks. At the end of that time, I knew that A) the house wasn’t going to sell quickly. B) I had no idea where I’d end up living. And C) Lego deserved a family to love him forever. The first person I told that Lego needed a good home was Wendy Reznicsek of the Northwest Children’s Theatre. After a couple weekend visits, she and her family of four adopted Lego. He lives today in doggy splendor in rural Hubbard, south of Portland. I miss him of course, but my loss is his gain. My brilliant sister-in-law Erin proved the family’s MVP and heroically stepped in to help my parents while I strove to do my best elsewhere. There are no thanks sufficient to the magnitude of her grace.

TRAVEL

I’d largely stopped traveling to shows, but when the kind people of Santa Clara invited me to be their artist guest of honor at BayCon last year, it inspired me to get out more. So this year I traveled to San Diego twice, Reno, Redmond, Corvallis and even the Columbia Gorge. I hope to continue this sort of schedule next year, though October’s 3-weekends-in-a-row was a little more extreme than even I found enjoyable.

Jeanette Pelster invited me to speak with her high-tech art and design students my brothers old alma mater, Benson Polytechnic High School. It was an amazing collection of technology in the service of education – I can only imagine how different that classroom was back in the day.

PROJECTS

This year saw the release of my Literary Pin-Up Calendar – I’d created it 4 years ago, only to find that Calendars were “a dead product”. Outside a few big behemoths, no one wanted to publish anything with such a short shelf life – no matter how much they liked the work itself. Happily Kat introduced me to her old friend and employer Pat Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind. And much to everyone’s surprise, Pat published the calendar through his charity Worldbuilders, and all moneys spent on the calendar go directly to Heifer International. So, working closely with Pat’s assistant Valerie, I revised all the dates, edited and prepared the files for print. I’m delighted with the results, and I hope I might make the calendar a yearly event. If you haven’t purchased one, for yourself or for a friend, I hope you will. Every dollar helps!

I’ve remained a freelancer this year after the strange company I was working for disappeared. It was nice to stretch my old Art Direction muscles in that job, but better still, I was reintroduced to the talented and delightful Lynn Gesue, an old colleague from my days at Magnet Interactive.

Caitlin R. Kiernan has been my pole star this year – I did two covers for her Subterranean Press books Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, (Volume One) and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (even as friends Kyle Cassidy and Steve Lieber worked their photographic and comic magic for her). Caitlin is an amazing writer and I hope every year will feature a collaboration or two. Other book covers this year included short story compendia The Door Gunner: The Best of Michael Bishop and A Stark and Wormy Knight: Tales of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Suspense by Tad Williams.

I was interviewed and given a profusely illustrated 8 Page feature in China’s Top Artist Magazine, as well as the front and back of a cover. Strange to see my words in Chinese, where proofreading is impossible, but I love the idea of having my work seen in Asia.

The other big project of mine that was finished this year is my game The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. Keith Baker was his usual brilliant self and made its ever-changing mechanics clever fun. I redid almost all of the art. Paul Komoda brought his exceptional Lovecraftian sensibilities to the 8 playing pieces. And we sold it to the well-regarded Z-Man Games. But just before it went to press, the game company was sold to a European concern that was not as vexed by Monopoly as we Americans are. And the game is now officially homeless. A shame since we know so many people interested in buying a copy, but given my calendar’s eventual publication, I’m hopeful that the time will come when its stars are right too.

I’m currently at work on a secret game project that has taken me to Seattle several times this year. I look forward to talking about it in this, my new journal, when I can. But for now mum’s the word. Better to mention the six great games I played at Ambercon NW between sessions in the soaking pool, and the ongoing collaboration between Dan Garrison and Zephy McKanna. I have been very lucky to play with such stellar talents this year, and hope to again next. Especially when Keith and Jenn rejoin us following their Austin adventure.

WEDDINGS

I’d introduced Keith Baker to Jenn Ellis two Christmasses back. It was a blatant set-up, but a sincere and effective one. Their marriage was a highlight of the year. Knowing they were to be married at the Kennedy School, I asked my many friends with paintings there if they had included subtle things in their works or knew any secrets that would make a wedding Scavenger Hunt a success (Paul Guinan‘s Boilerplate hiding in the Boiler Room for example). Christopher Robbins put me in touch with the sublime Lyle Hehn, a man I’d wanted to meet since first moving to Portland a decade ago. Lyle is the reclusive artist, type designer and Art Director for the McMenamin’s and his tour of the school showed me such interesting details of his, and others, work. I asked if I might commission an original 8.5″ by 11″ ink piece for the happy couple, but he preferred to paint a big smooth river rock instead. Could I find pictures of the bride and groom as kids? I knew Keith’s family, and happily, Jenn’s was equally cooperative. Lyle’s painting was just the thing – it was my gift to the couple, and I used it to make the signage for the event itself. In exchange, I’ve painted Lyle’s ink drawings of his fine daughters as Christmas gifts.

The other big wedding of the year was my brilliant friend Adam Danger to Traci Cook at the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse. Jason came up from LA and we groomsmen looked sharp in our chocolate tuxes and brown Chuck Taylor hightops.

BUT WAIT, THERE”S MORE!

Thanksgiving with Kyle, Trillian, Roger and Carolee was a wonderful sequel to their visit of two years earlier. Thank goodness for guests! While the others stayed home and finished preparing the feast, I took a trip to the ER with Carolee and I learned that my fall down the back stairs hadn’t broken my hand after all. Whew!

Selena Coppa was my guest when she came to Portland for a big IVAW function, and for my new neighborhood’s annual street party. Other delightful guests in the four-bedroom Craftsman bungalow I’m renting included the Barker ladies, Nate, Melissa, Anna, Rob, Scott, Robin and Venetia. I hope to see more travelers in 2012. This house wants a lot of life inside its lovely walls.

Other highlights: Conflict Resolution class with my dear high school pal Cary Morrison, Dinner and dessert with Amy Crehore and Shawna Gore, Hugo-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal‘s holiday soiree, many meetings and collaborations with Nebula-nominated Felicity Shoulders, The Portland Juggling Festival and a splendid lawn party hosted by the Cantor Jonases. I’ve learned so much from my friends this year that I feel a little like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Everyone has important knowledge and wisdom, and it has been a great honor to share it. I feel like I’ve left a lot out, but anyone patient enough to have read this far is probably grateful for that.

I wish you and yours the very brightest of this dark time.
Peace and good will to all.

Cheers!
Lee

PS: This will be my last massive Holiday note. Rather than trying to sum up, I think I’ll try to communicate throughout the year in this Journal format. Please join me here in my future ramblings if you are so moved.

*The Hollywood in question is the Portland neighborhood that was named after its theatre (shown on my card this year), as opposed to the more famous version marked by the remains of the Hollywoodland development sign.