What I'm working on

I'm finishing up some art for a PreSchool Educational job. This piece reminds me of my truck playing days with my son. We spent many happy hours in the sandbox making up stories about good, heroic trucks and evil, troublemaking trucks. He was so into trucks when he was 2 and 3 years old, I was sure that's what he would end up doing as a career. But he just graduated from college with a degree in Forestry. At least he still gets to drive some types of trucks, and owns a pickup!

New Art

I just received a sample of the July 2009 issue of Highlights High Five Magazine, which has a spread of my art - a "Guess My Riddle" puzzle. I couldn't fit the entire spread on my scanner, but here's most of it. It was fun to work on, especially researching all those cacti. Having been born and raised in the Midwest, I've never acually seen a desert, but I hope to one day!

New Book

I just received a printed sample of the new book I illustrated for Kane Press. The Yum-Yum House is a "Math Matters" book written by Nan Walker - a very funny and clever book that actually makes math fun!

Sunday Afternoon at Herrick Lake

There was nothing much going on last Sunday afternoon, so I decided to go to Herrick Lake and do some people sketching. On such a beautiful, sunny day, it was crowded - people jogging and walking their dogs, fishing on the shore or canoeing on the lake, lots of people just sitting in lawn chairs reading...

Spring Promo Postcard

I finished that painting I started a while back, and had the postcards printed and sent out by USPS to all my clients. Here's the final result. USPS always seems to print darker or with more blue than the original art, so I'm not totally thrilled, but for the price and convenience, it's okay. Of course, this was a night scene, but I'll scale back on the blue for the next postcard.

The boy graduates!

My son Matthew graduated from Southern Illinois University last weekend with a BS degree in Forestry. We were so proud of him - and no more tuition payments - yay! The day before, a huge wind storm had blown through Carbondale creating a lot of destruction and knocking out all power, but the University still managed to have graduation. It will be one to remember!

Starting a new book

I haven't been on my blog in a while and the next few weeks are going to be busy for me : a family wedding, moving my daughter out of her college dorm and back home for the summer, traveling to southern Illinois for my son's graduation from SIU... In the meantime, though, I'm happy to start work on another book for Kane Press. Since I feel that this blog should be a record of what I'm working on and how I work, I'm posting my first sketches, even though they look like a bunch of chicken scratchings! I always start with sketches of the main characters so I can get an idea of how they'll look...

I also do thumbnail sketches of the entire book, in this case using the manuscript and layouts provided by the publisher. This gives me an idea of how the illustrations will flow, so I have variety in the compostions. I also decide what parts of the story I want to emphasize with the illustrations.

And then there's all the reference research for specific objects, which I mostly do on the computer now. It's much easier - I just google in something like "photos of girl sitting cross-legged" and I get tons of photos! I can throw out my boxloads of xeroxed references! Anyway, you can see how much work goes into the book even before I start drawing something serious.