Sunset and Christmas trees

Our sunset was amazing last night! Talk about art!! But then who can compete with God's paintbrush?!


This one's a bit dark but I was trying to get the Christmas trees in the windows. I should have left the porch light off.

Changes

There are often changes from original sketches to the final painting stage in a book. I thought it would be fun to show the original sketch along with the final cover to show the changes on Kate's Surprise's cover.

To grandmother's house we go...

Over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house we go...I always loved that song and it always reminds me of Thanksgiving so HAPPY THANKSGIVING ALL!

Small world

This past weekend my husband, Brad and I went to the Missouri SCBWI conference where he was asked to speak on a "First Books Panel". He and I did a book together called My Brother and I. It was his first book and my favorite project thus far, for obvious reasons.

The keynote speaker was Cheryl Klein, an editor at Arthur Levine Books(an imprint of Scholastic). An interesting side note...Cheryl graduated from the same high school as our daughter, about eight years prior. Her home town is where we've lived these past 18 years. Is it a small world or what? I have often had this silly perception of NY editors as these unapproachable people who only wear black. Well, I was wrong. Cheryl was very sweet and approachable and she was wearing brown.

Dancing elephants and birthdays

I really enjoy doing black and white illustrations with washes. They're quick and you get to see instant results without having to think so much about color!

Here's a couple from an educational job I did a couple years ago.

Brrrr!

The temperature is supposed to be down in the twenties tonight. Brrrr!

This cold weather made me think of the art I did last year for Kate's Surprise, a Rookie Reader. Here's the cover and a couple inside pages. Kate's brother is stuck indoors because he's sick. Poor little guy can only dream of sledding while his sister Kate gets to go out and play in the snow. Kate tries to cheer him up with a surprise.

Robert's Snow

I can't believe it's already November!! With November comes Robert's Snow. If you haven't heard of it, please go check it out. It's a wonderful story and for a wonderful cause. I can't wait to join in on bidding at the auctions, the first starting Nov. 19th.

I didn't get the opportunity to create a snowflake this year. Somehow I regretfully missed the deadline to get involved in the 2007 fund raiser but I did have the privilege the two prior times. I thought I'd go ahead and show my past years snowflakes. The polar bear was done in acrylics and the skating bears were watercolor. I also show the back of the skating bears snowflake where I used salt to mimic an icy look.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Working with publishers overseas

I have worked with a couple publishers overseas and both experiences were luckily good ones. One was a publisher in Korea and then the other was a publisher in New Zealand. The NZ publisher all started with kind of a crazy story.

Several years ago, actually more like seven years ago...my husband and I were lucky enough to get to visit the beautiful country of New Zealand. While I was there, in Auckland, I decided to try and contact a publisher while I was in town just to touch base and possibly set up a meeting. The meeting didn't work out but I was able to chat via email with the nice art director. It was 5 years later but that same art director contacted me to do a project with him. It just proved to me that any contacts we make, whether it's by email, direct mail, etc. is never a wasted effort although so many times it feels we are sending our mailers and promotions out into a deep dark hole with no return. It may take seven years to see a result but we gotta have faith, right?

Here is the cover of the reader I did for the New Zealand Publisher, Sunshine Books/Wendy Pye Ltd. I wasn't crazy about the choice of type used on the cover but overall it was a great project and the art director was a dream to work with!

Digital or Acrylics

Lately, I have been working in two different mediums. For educational work, I get a lot of requests for my digital watercolor style and then with trade work or other projects I have been doing my traditional acrylic style. I experimented with a piece that I sketched in Painter using my Wacom Cintiq and then painted it in digital watercolor and then did another one in traditional acrylics and as you will see I made a few changes.

Fall Art

Since the Fall theme keeps coming up I thought I'd post a piece I did a few years back. This was painted with digital watercolor using Painter.


This one was mixed media...a little watercolor, a little digital collage with a little colored pencil added.

Autumn colors

There is something different about the sunsets in Autumn...they just seem more colorful. I took this one out my back steps a couple nights ago.

Here's some mums on my front porch. I just love Fall! It's my favorite season!

A couple sketches

Welcome to my new blog!!

Welcome to my blog where I will try and post what I am working on from time to time as well as what's going on in my life.

I'm new to the whole blogging world so it make take some time for me to get the hang of it!