I am getting more comfortable with Photoshop, and used it to do this HP image for Highlights this spring. Fun!
Coloring pencil drawings, digitally
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A busy few months!
cover image: Fine Life For A Country Mouse
My picture book Fine Life For A Country Mouse, the dummy for which I revised and submitted repeatedly over several years, will be published next fall by Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group. I am so pleased! I’ve spent the last few months producing the final artwork: 29 watercolor paintings.
It is a retelling of an Aesop’s fable; the story of a simple country mouse, Tillie, who is visited by her city cousin, Oliver. Snobbish Oliver is bored and unimpressed with Tillie’s hospitality and convinces her to go with him to the city and see what she is missing.
The work has consumed me, but was such a joy, and I am now eagerly starting new projects.
Sand Frog
I love to sculpt sand at the beach! It is relaxing and fun and a great way to meet people. This frog was made one afternoon during the week we spent at Bethany Beach, DE in June. But the tides were not with me; high tide occurred while I worked, and I had to build a wall to protect my frog after rebuilding his front feet.
Using updated skills
Sometimes I take an assignment that is very different from my usual work for children, and it can provide a refreshing break. In this case, I was asked to depict a barbeque grill from a photograph — I needed to clean up the image and drop out the background.
I decided to draw the grill and add tone and depth digitally, using techniques I learned back in the old days as airbrush: we would cut frisket (like giant scotch tape) with x-acto knives to open some areas of the artwork and mask others. It was tedious compared with today’s digital tools, and much harder to correct a mistake.
I traced the photo, and then produced a clean, more precise pencil drawing, which I scanned into Photoshop.
Then it was a matter of using Photoshop to select areas of the drawing and create the colors and tones the way I learned when using an airbrush, only with much less mess and stress!
Flying Over Florence
watercolor and digital
This is an illustration for a story I am working on.
New Promotion Tool
Baltimore Precision Instruments
I have had some exciting assignments from local clients, and I hope to get more. I just opened an account with Thumbtack in the pursuit of new clients. Check it out here:
Exceptional Custom Illustration
I love to get advertising and editorial assignments, and especially to create custom greeting cards for local companies — it helps promote business for both of us!
Red Canoe Children’s Books & Coffee House
sketch for Tom Sawyer
I am working on an illustration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and this is my sketch for the piece. I am thinking of doing the final as a woodcut.
Martha and George Washington
My most recent assignment was fun to do — a portrait of the first First Lady and President, done as a vintage painting. Here is the progression of the piece.
Some Characters
These were doodles that turned into characters.. do you think there’s a story here?
A recent assignment from Highlights
Highlights for Children Art Director Dolores Motichka gave me this assignment recently. It is for a puzzle titled Funny Fractions that will be published in the March 2013 issue. The space I had for the illustration was in a backwards L shape, according to the rough layout she sent. Dolores described what she wanted to see:
I made some quick sketches, trying at first to fill the L space with the shape of the eagle, but then deciding that this open-wing gesture was not conveying the right emotion, and changing his stance to folded wings.
I gathered eagle images form the web, and then refined my sketch, flipping it to fill the space.
This was approved by Dolores Motichka and the Highlights editors after a few days and with a few tweaks. The layout of this puzzle had been changed, and Dolores showed me how my illustration would fit: I had to flip the eagle again, shorten his tail feathers, adjust the position of the postcard slightly, and rewrite the message and address from the corrected angle. No problem!
The finished piece was done in pencil and watercolor on illustration board.
