Making It, Locus Awards, plus other stuff

Heading off to Spectrum Fantastic Art Live this weekend and I'm really really looking forward to so many things, one of them being the Documentary Making It, about, well, making it as an illustrator. 

Then they posted their promo photo and here's what Irene Gallo noticed about it:

Post by Irene Gallo.

(A lot of really great comments on that FB thread, including mention of a lot of great women and people of color who are "making it" as successful illustrators.)

I'm still looking forward to seeing the documentary. But just, yeah.

Anyhooo... Then a few hours later the Locus Awards Finalists were announced and Congrats to all the nominees! It's a wonderful line up.

But there is this:

Dear Locus Award nominators: It’s been nine years since a female human was in the top five for Best Artist. This is, you know, nuts.
— P Nielsen Hayden (@pnh) May 8, 2014

Which led Julie Dillon to spontaneously tweet a list of 14 amazing women who happen to be illustrators (she did, after all, dedicate a tumbler to the issue.)

Actually... just for my own purposes (and since it's been quite the topic today), here's Julie's tweeted list, with links:

Kirsti Wakelin
Fiona Staples
Ursula Vernon
Terese Nielsen
Lauren Bifano
Rebecca Mock
Becky Cloonan
Karla Ortiz
Victo Ngai
Tran Nguyen
Winona Nelson
Cynthia Sheppard
Audrey Benjaminsen
Lindsey Look

(And that's just scratching the surface. Just today at Tor.com new fiction went up with an illustration by Anna & Elena Balbusso. I love it when that happens. )

It's hard to know how to make note of this all and not have it come off as seeming negative about the incredible artists that are in that promo photo line-up for Making It (Andrew Bawidamann, Brian Ewing, Eric Fortune,Woodrow J. Hinton III, etc)  and nominated for the Locus Awards (Bob Eggleton, John Picacio, Shaun Tan, Charles Vess, and Michael Whelan.) They are brilliant amazing artists. It's just one of those things. That's all.

Well, I'll leave it at that. Except that I'm happy because issue 13 of Fireside Fiction went up today, including the illustration I did for Jonas David's 'Repossession', and because next week a new story by Sofia Samatar is going live over at Lackingtons, which I also got to illustrate.

illustration for Repossession, © galen dara 2014