Hi.

First off, I want one of you to have this oil painting I started of a bear eating a hand.

There is nothing to be decoded in this image—I painted it during a recent chat with Mark Hoffman during one of his live Instagram things, and if you want to see me paint it and listen in on our conversation, you can find Parts 1 and 2 of it HERE. Mark mentioned he thought I drew hands well, and hoped to see me paint something with a hand in it, and if this was the first idea that subsequently came into my head then that’s just something we can all puzzle over quietly on our own time.

I think I’ll work on it a little more, but in the meantime I’m auctioning it off to raise relief funds for Minnesotans.

This painting is just the thing for someone’s house. Like, maybe your bedroom has a bear theme and your living room has a hand theme, and you need something for the hallway. Or maybe you have a bathroom that you don’t really care about.

As usual, Lian Cho has already made a better post about the auction, and I present it with permission below. Scroll down if you’re interested in the mentorship.

Hi again. The other thing I wanted to tell you about is my participation in the fifth and final year of the PB Rising Stars mentorship program.

Each one of those 40 books above represents one of the mentors taking part this year, and you can lean more about it all here:

But the gist is that, from all the applications they receive, I’ll be choosing one mentee who thinks I may be able to help them with their picture book text-only manuscript, illustrated dummy, portfolio, or any combination of the three. We’ll set our own schedule to work together over the summer and get as much out of the relationship we can.

If you have questions about the auction OR the mentorship, let me know in the comments!