Newborn/Moleskine Sketch

Happiness is a newborn baby.

Make A Child Smile RAK (Randon Act of Kindness)

I recently joined a site for Artist Trading Cards. ATC's (as they're called) are small works of art created in trading card size, usually about two and a half inches by three and a half inches. These cards are often traded between artists, and upon further reading, I found out this idea was started by the impressionists. They would trade cards to study the other's technique. Anyways, through this site I found a program called Make A Child Smile
where three sick children are featured each week, and you can send them greeting cards to cheer them up. There are some wonderful photos of kids with big smiles on their faces surrounded by hundreds of colorful greeting cards. ATC had the clever idea of sending a regular card and also adding an original artist trading card. I'm going to participate in this, and invite you to as well.

Illustration Friday : Cars

The Moon and Two Trees

Watercolors on Fabriano cold press 5" x 7"
$75 including shipping.
E-mail Me To Purchase

Hibiscus

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Bird Feeder At Night

My First Website

I don't remember how long ago this was - probably over ten years, but at one point I wanted to be a greeting card illustrator. I had read Mary Engelbreit's book and was filled with inspiration. So soon after, I put up my website (as unprofessional looking as one can possibly get lol). You can definitely see the heavy Mary Engelbreit influence here, but I sure did learn a good deal about design and composition. Beforehand, I knew nothing of those all important aspects of drawing. These were done in marker (which I developed an allergy to--smelly smelly smelly) and colored pencil.

I fell even more deeply in love with children's books before any of these were every published.

Quick Watercolor Sketch - Garden

My brother was kind enough to send along a surprise present. I was beyond excited about this amazing little travel box. The 'cap' of the box fits in a groove to form the water holder, the white bottle on the right, which stores water, also forms a palette when placed on it's side, and to top it off, a foldable brush!

Winsor and Newton Artist's Field Box

Recently I made myself even more mobile with these:


Niji Water Brush
You store water right in the brush - squeeze the base to push it out. I painted the above quick painting on my moleskine journal with the middle sized brush while standing and waiting for a friend to pick out flowers at the flower shop.

Illustration Friday: Signs

The Beekeeper

Baseball

More Sketches

I made a huge mistake here. I started drawing a bear right on the watercolor paper. No preliminaries etc, and was planning for it to be a simple bear spot illustration. Then I kept adding to it. A tree here, a pig there, and pretty soon it was a complicated piece on expensive watercolor paper with little room for me to adjust anything. Picture someone painting themselves into a corner. I'm still deciding whether I should go to color on this, or keep making adjustments on more sketch pad paper and consider this one a very expensive sketch.

Moleskine Sketches

Six Weird Things About Me

This is long overdo, but better late than never right?

1. I'm a HUGE fan of video games. My brother and I both grew up playing them, and now so many games are made for adult geeks like me. The graphics are beautiful, and the soundtracks are as good as or better than movies. I especially love the WWII genre. They're historically accurate so you get to play through actual famous battles. The video game industry is huge now - for several years, video games have bipassed movies in earnings
2. I love food that's bad for me. I eat well like I'm supposed to, but what I really want most of the time is the stuff that makes you age early, and end up on a dialysis machine by the time you're 40. What I love: hot dogs, hamburgers, pancakes, chocolate cake, donuts, bacon, BBQ Ribs, Pizza, Fried chicken, biscuits dripping in butter, white bread and jam, fast food, Taco Bell, McDonalds, microwave dinners, cookies, pies, pastas.

What I eat: brocolli, chicken, all sorts of veggies, sandwiches, cereal, oatmeal, organic frozen meals, yogurt, soy milk etc...

I often wonder though...if bad food was good for us, and good food was bad for us, would I crave the health food? Nah.

Strangely enough, I love working out and weigh lifting.

3. I run from bees. I don't care what the social situation is, I up and flee. I'm an allergic person, so don't want to wait and find out if bee stings are on the list. Other bugs don't bother me at all and I actually find them fascinating---I find nature fascinating.

4.I find Tom Hanks very attractive! He's not the typical Hollywood hottie or anything, but I just love the whole package - he's exactly the type of guy I would go for.

5.I played fast pitch softball year 'round from the age of 10 and one season I hit home runs almost every time I stepped up to the plate - we won all our games because they put me at cleanup (meaning fourth batter) and I kept hitting everyone in. The next season my vision got worse and I had to get glasses....that was the end up my batting abilities. Although I still hit well, it was never as good as that one magical summer season.

6.I stay up really late when I work. My whole family is made up of night owls and I'm no exception, so I'm guessing there's a genetic predisposition. I often try to make myself fit into a more normal schedule of sleep, but it's a constant fight. I always want to stay up and late and sleep late. My best work seems to come about after 12 am.

I'm going to cheat and add another, and I think this falls more under 'weird stories that are gross'. My older brother was in ROTC and sporting one of those military buzz cuts. Well one day when he was visiting (I was 12 I think) I was eating Captain Crunch cereal at the table, and he was sitting in front of me watching TV on the couch. His noggin was a mere foot and a half away from my eating area. Well suddenly I was overcome by the most explosive sneeze whilst holding a rather large load of captain crunch in my mouth. Needless to say the little yellow particles stuck to the back of my brother's shaved head like velcro. I thought it was very VERY funny at the time. Especially when my brother turned around and asked,"what's so funny?"

Well that's about it!

Drum Roll Please...

Announcing........

The Picture Book Junkies Blog! Check it out!

For Mom

Illustration Friday : Citrus

Mysterious Hat

Apologies to those who posted on the 'pie' illustration. I decided I didn't like it and took it down.

Illustration Friday: Neighbor

I don't know about you, but I'm always running into neighbors at the library.

Illustration Friday : Neighbor

Click here to enlarge

This was done in my Moleskine watercolor journal. Very nice quality watercolor paper--I was pleasantly surprised!

Dummy Page 8-9

Book Dummy Pages 6-7

I've found that if I'm working on a book dummy and get burned out, working on another for an hour in between refreshes me. I guess it's the change in subject matter that does this. So here are a couple pages from mystery book #2.

And yes I know the balloon titles are different - I was experimenting with it.

Blast From The Past

I did this image four years ago for my Mom for mother's day. It's of me and my childhood dog Captain Jack lazing around by the water.

Imaginary Pirates on an Imaginary Ship