I submitted my design for Priscilla Ahn’s new album. She had a contest Her new album is entitled "When I Grow Up," and she wants the cover to be inspired by children’s book illustrations, Miyazaki films, or the mori girl style (japanese for “forest girl”. I figured if I couldn’t design something like this, something that’s exactly my style, exactly what inspires me, too, then I might as well just go home. lol. I couldn’t not do this. Priscilla’s music reminds me of my golden afternoons outside with Tiny, swinging on my tire swing and pretending I had wings. So I painted exactly that.
The image makes me feel quite happy on its own, regardless of anything else. It felt like very good therapy, right here a year after Tiny’s passing. Whether someone wants it on her album or not, this is special to me. It’s full of my heart. It’s about reckless love and daydreams and hope and flight and books and magic. You know it’s full of your heart when you fight back tears while you’re sketching the rough draft. *O_O*
I’ve been daydreaming about what I would do with the prize money if I won. It would have to be something extremely special, and it would have to send me to the sky. When I was a little girl, I remember standing on a chair in the nonfiction section, looking for books about flight after having read Jane Langton’s "The Fledgling", a story about a girl who could fly. So I found "Jonathan Livingston Seagull." And I read it, all of it, ten years old, sitting in the wooden chair amongst the stacks in the library. And then I found a book on hang gliding. And I promised myself that one day, when I grew up, I would fly. So you see. If I should win the cover design for Ahn’s "When You Grow Up", the prize money will help me to take to the sky. I’m serious, people.
Oh, oh. dreaming all day…I am afraid to get my hopes up. The contest had over three hundred submissions, and there are some very pretty ones in there that have that nice minimalistic mori girl thing going on that mine doesn’t exactly have. Oh well. It is still pretty neat that Priscilla Ahn herself will have looked at my artwork. And I got 5 star user ratings, which blew my mind. And my design was on the front page of Creative Allies as a featured creation, which blew my mind again. How cool is that? That’s a nice confidence boost that I honestly needed very much.
I am going to tweak and improve my pretty picture and frame it (the original version without the masking tape and words), a daily visual reminder of all that it stands for. Thank you, dear Tiny. And thank you, Priscilla Ahn, for the inspiration and opportunity! 
