9.20.09 Various Sketches

I can only imagine that some version of "Harvey" was floating around in my head as I started these.

Upcoming Event

My studio partner and I will be giving a talk about the life and process of an illustrator as part of "A Children's Place" bookstore's upcoming 35 anniversary. This is the first time I've done a ticketed event. Feels pretty high-class!

9.16.09 Various Sketches

Crawling inside the heads of some amazing Disney artists.
The best part of any Disney production is getting to see the inspiration drawings/paintings that led up to the finished film. So much to learn from these illustrators!

9.15.09 Various Sketches

I participate in an illustrator blog where the challenge is to do at least a page of sketching a day. This is oddly more challenging than it sounds but incredibly helpful. I find it easy to fall into the trap of "this is what I do -- this is how I draw". When you've got to do that every day I find that it gets old eventually. One can't help but start branching out to try other things. I've noticed that I no longer draw edges (or at least edges aren't the focus of my drawing) but rather shapes of light and dark and let the edges sort themselves out.

Painting Portland Parks

Been working on some plein-air paintings the last few weeks. Here's some examples.

Travel Sketches: Korea

Some drawings done from not-good-enough to post photos (the subjects kept moving). Playing with pen and ink mediums.

Creatures

I'm having a great time playing with old images of monsters/creatures from various manuscripts. Basically extrapolating from tiny drawings into these various different poses/interpretations.

Sketches: Animals

I can never draw too many animals. You never know when you might need the visual memory to create a new creature.

Travel Sketches: Korea

Continuing the sketches from my trip to Korea. This is part of a Buddist temple in the northern part of South Korea. Freakin' beautiful. Right on the edge of the ocean!

Travel Sketches: Korea

A quick sketch done while traveling in Korea recently. This is a view from the rooftop in a neighborhood of Seoul.

Two Book out this Fall

Just in time for the holidays -- the last two books in the Dandilion Rhymes series:

God Loves Me More Than That



and "When God Created My Toes"



Both are available on Amazon or ordered at your local bookseller.

Author Portraits: Twain

In continuing the "Who's more fun than . . ." theme, here's Mark Twain.
I'm noticing an early trend -- this might actually turn out to be all about authors with exaggerated facial hair.

Author Portraits: Tolstoy

Thought that I'd create a series of portraits of fun, interesting, thought-provoking authors.
Who better to start with than Tolstoy?

SCBWI LA Conference - More speaker sketches

Here are some additional sketches from my recent trip to the SCBWI LA Conference.



Tracey Adams of Adams Literary gave a great talk titled "Contract Basics: The Art & Science of Publishing Agreements.
I love this kind of thing at SCBWI conferences since it has the effect of reinforcing the fact that SCBWI is a "professional" organization. Plus Tracey obviously enjoys and is very good at her job. Her enthuasiam for the business side of children's books is infectious.


Arthur Levine of Arthur A Levine Books was part of a panel discussion which also included Mark McVeigh, Krista Marino and Elizabeth Parisi. The discussion was about "Professional Criticism:How to Receive It and What To Do With It". This was a pretty serious topic handled in a really fun light-hearted way. It was nice to hear that editors and art directors are as nervous about giving critiques as we all are to recieve them


Rachel Griffiths headlined a breakout session titled "How to Catch and Editors Attention". This was great fun because I know Rachel best from my trips to NYC to do portfolio drop-offs when she was Arthur Levine's assistant. Our meetings are typcially quite brief, involving Rachel handing me back my portfolio with a nice note or comment. Since it's a bit tougher in recent years to schedule face to face meetings with editors and ADs these interactions were often the highlight of a day spent running all over the city. So attending Rachel's session was an opportunity to get a clearer sense of who Rachel is both as a person and as an editor. Turns out she's a really funny and engaging speaker.

More sketches from the conference to come . . .

SCBWI LA Conference

I recently attended the SCBWI LA Summer Conference.
As ever it was fun, informative and exhausting.
The weekend is jam-packed with speakers and breakout sessions. One of the things that I tend to do when taking notes is do quick sketches of the person giving the talk. So while my notes are almost unintelligible to anyone but me I thought that I'd post some of the sketches of the invited speakers.
First up on Friday was Walter Dean Meyers .



Followed by Peter Brown the illustrator of "Chowder" and the sequel "Bouncing Chowder"