My first written and illustrated children's book manuscript has been completed and submitted to a publisher. I know this may be a journey of rejection and a ton of waiting but I know that this children's story has a purpose. I just need to be diligent in sending it out and pray it falls into the right hands. Tomorrow it heads to a publisher's board for review!

Don't get discouraged! I have been working on writing and illustrating a children's book for a while. I've had some really good ideas and some that fell short. Until one day, telling my son a bedtime story a lovable character came to be. After drafts and drafts of what the characters would look like on paper, there they were cheerfully looking back at me. My son ran over to my sketchbook and excitedly said, "it's them! What are they doing?" The journey of character development still continues. I never really thought about all the different pros and cons to so many mediums used for illustration. Watercolor is easy to layer, but I found myself having difficulties replicating the exact same colors for the characters, color pencils were vibrant but lacked the textures I was seeking, acrylics are always my go too so I decided to stick with the medium I was most familiar with. After planning a few illustrations for the children's book I needed to import them into photoshop to add images to the  book layout. I use a Microsoft Surface Go simply for the ease of traveling with it for writing and for sketching. Well, let's just say after the first imported image I was getting a, "scratch disks are full," message. I had no clue what that even meant. I got super frustrated and had my husband explain and show me what that meant entirely. Needless to say, the hard drive does not have enough storage to run the program. We contemplated getting a new computer so I could work easier, but I just couldn't see spending almost $2,000. So, I paused my photoshop subscription and went back to the drawing board, literally. I finally completed the layout and colorblocking for all 26 illustrations. But what was I going to do with them after that? After a bunch of research I realized purchasing an external hard drive could be the solution. Guess what? It worked! Don't let one thing that is unexpected stop you from making a dream a reality.