Jenny

“It would have been easy to create the illustrations in this book on a computer -- to take a photo of an original artwork and edit Kitten in digitally. It was a greater challenge, and a whole lot more fun, to see if I could actually make pieces of art that looked like the originals in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and blend Kitten's headlong pursuit of the mouse into them. Everything you see Kitten encountering and exploring in this book was handmade, using acrylic and oil paints, gouache, ink, plaster, wood, gold leaf, clay, paper, glass, lead, and more. Some of the techniques I used were ones that I'd done before, and some were new to me.

So yes, it could have been done digitally. And now, artificial intelligence even allows us to enter a description of what we want, and in seconds, the computer spits out an image. But where's the satisfaction in that? The computer created it, not us.

If you like making things, practice. Practice makes better! It takes time to develop skills so things turn out the way you want them to; the way you see them in your imagination--you can't simply leap ahead and skip all that work. But it's fun to write stories and to make pictures and build things, and I hope you'll do these things because they're satisfying. Focus on the enjoyment you get while your skills are coming along. You can make pretty much anything you want to, if you teach yourself how.

If people before us could do it, why not me? Why not you?”
― Brian Lies, Cat Nap

“In my hometown, the number of children living in poverty has more than tripled since I left.[4] The number orphaned by the opioid crisis has tripled just since 2015.[5] After the jobs went away, heroin helped itself to my hometown, followed by fentanyl and meth. The result of that one-two punch has been a preponderance of trauma that is overtaxing every system meant to address it. “Backward mobility,” economists call this devastating trend, exacerbated by the Great Recession. As corporate profits soared, the median wage for workers, adjusted for inflation, stagnated, and the cost of housing, education, and health care far outpaced inflation. In the four decades between my graduation and Silas’s, inequality grew so dramatically in the United States that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans have accumulated the same amount of wealth as the poorest 50 percent.[6]”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“the late 1990s, average tuition in the United States had more than doubled from when I went to school, while the value of the top Pell award dropped 25 percent. When President Bill Clinton touted his Hope Scholarship and related tuition tax credits as a doubling of federal funding for financial aid, it was a sleight of hand, catering solely to middle-class students who were already going to college. That same decade, Clinton oversaw the country’s catastrophic entry into NAFTA in 1994 and paved the way for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001. He predicted that offshoring would eventually prove to be a “win-win” for American workers. Our country still suffers the fallout of those disastrous decisions, which were cheered by business schools and Nobel Prize–winning economists, including several who have since recanted their pro-offshoring views.[”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

“America’s student-loan debt machine is now larger than Americans’ combined credit-card debt.[11] Think about how many college graduates have amassed five- and six-figure student-loan debts, and yet a third still earn less than half the nation’s median wage.[12] While economists argue that a four-year degree is still the best long-term path forward,[13] only half of Americans participate in any form of higher ed at all. When they pulled the ladder of upward mobility away from low-wage families, they took away the thing that soothes misery and distress; they took away their hope. What the free-market boosters failed to account for is that, without the potential for advancement and the general sense that fairness and justice will prevail, our social compact is screwed. The more divided our education levels, the more divided our nation.”
― Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America