Illustration Friday - Detective

I may work on this one just a tiny bit more. But, for now - it's time to post it to IF.

After Hours Drawing - The Report Wasn't Good

Sometimes in the late hours of the evening, our fears and anxieties rise to the top. This is another After Hours Drawing that seemed to flow from my mind to my hand with very little effort.

Illustration Friday - Linked

This is the first time I've tried Illustration Friday. I've enjoyed looking at the other illustrations. Some great stuff there! Finally, I decided to give it a try. This certainly isn't a typical piece for me. Another experiment with technique. I tried using Caran d'Ache Neocolor painting crayons - the water soluble kind. I've used them before in combination with colored pencil. In that case, they had to go on top of the pencil and are really good for highlights, emphasis, etc. And, I didn't use water. This piece is done with the painting crayons only and with water. So, I got a much better feel of how these things are truly meant to be used. This won't be a portfolio piece, just a fun little experiment. But, I will definitely be using this technique in the future, perhaps combined with oil or alkyds. I really do love these painting crayons. Caran d'Ache has one of the most beautiful websites I've ever seen. If you'd like a peak, you can check it out here. So beautiful!

The extreme coolness of cooliris

I made myself a new website recently and wanted to include a slideshow. I'm extremely happy that I discovered cooliris! It's not just cool, I think it's deliciously, stunningly beautiful. But then, that's part of the coolness, of course! Not only could I create my own wall of images that can be seen full screen, I can now view a vast amount of visual web content through the elegant, luxurious eye of cooliris. For example, I can browse Bing, Flickr, Picasa, Google Images or Facebook photos on a cooliris wall in full screen mode. It's excellent for photo reference research for illustrators, as you might imagine!
What you see above is just a tiny glimpse of cooliris. To experience the full screen effect, you'll need to do a small download from their site. Once you do the download, a tiny icon will appear, automatically on your menu bar. And the cooliris icon will appear on visual web content as you view it. You can use cooliris by clicking the tiny icon or ignore it if you prefer to skip it that particular time.. If you do the download, you will also have the ability to adjust your personal viewing settings such as the angle of the wall, the number of columns, and the speed of slideshows. It's a beautiful thing!
Even with the mini version above, and without the download, you can still have a pretty nice little slideshow. Try clicking on a single image above. The image will come to the forefront. Then click the slideshow icon in the center on the bottom. Nice! You can use the forward or back buttons, but it's kind of a bumpy ride, in this small version. The blue button in the center is a quick way to navigate, but can make you whoozy in this small version too. All the more reason to do the download! Gives you more control. Obviously, I'm besotted with cooliris - not even slightly objective, but I hope and suspect you may love it too!
If you are interested in creating your own wall in cooliris, you'll first need to upload your content to a site such as Picasa, Flickr or Facebook. The options are listed on the cooliris site. Once you have your images up, you can follow the step by step instructions on the cooliris site here and then embed your slideshow on your website or blog - or both! Or, just enjoy the enhanced visual experience of cooliris for web browsing extraordinaire!

After Hours Drawing - Pierrot's Magic Sphere

Something a bit different. But that is, after all, the purpose of After Hours Drawing for me - to be free to stretch my characters and experiment with style. In this case, the character stretching is, obviously, somewhat literal. The character of Pierrot is very intriguing to me. This drawing started with the nose. Just the nose. It all seemed to flow from that long, exaggerated, elegant nose. Pierrot emerged. I think there are some problems with this drawing that could be resolved with color. I'll let you come to your own conclusions about that. For me? I might have to take it to color and see what happens!

I've Been Honored.........

I'm very honored to have this award, bestowed by my friend and fellow illustrator Susan Miller. Thank you, Susan!

Here are the rules for this award...
1) Thank the person who gave you this award.
2) Share 7 things about yourself.
3) Pass the award along to 5 bloggers who you have recently discovered and you think are fantastic!
4) Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.

Here are 7 things about me:
1) I love Pearl Jam, Puccini, Vivaldi, and Bagpipe music.
2) Browsing used book stores is a favorite hobby - I buy too many!
3) My husband and daughter are still surprised by things I do sometimes. To be honest, so am I.
4) I love taking day trips with my husband and my dog.
5) I'm tall.
6) My collection of Italian soap is fantastic and growing!
7) My daughter lives nearby - I love her like crazy and I'm very lucky!

Here are my top 5 blog picks:

Susan Miller's blog Behind the Pencil, is fresh and fun with lovely artwork and beautiful craft projects.

Judith Moffatt's blog, Ms. Moffatt's Blog is full of her wonderful artwork, photos of her dog Lula Belle (my dog's best buddy!) and clever craft projects too!

Diane Mayr's blog, Random Noodling, is often beautiful, always smart, entertaining and a joy to read. Diane describes herself as "a children's writer, haiku nut, librarian, and lover of noodles."

Laura Jacobsen's blog, Laura Jacobsen Illustration, showcases Laura's beautiful artwork as well as her insiteful, wry and humorous writing. I love her voice!

I always enjoy Paula Pertile's blog, Drawing a Fine Line. Paula has a great sense of humor which shines along with her lovely artwork. She's good at posting newsworthy things for illustrators as well as entertaining things about her life and art.

After Hours Drawing - Big Brother Dragon

An adolescent dragon, big brother to the baby below. Maybe someday I'll put these two together in a drawing. Maybe not. The baby below has more energy, but this guy's got some character.... I think.

After Hours Drawing - It's Hatched!

"Spring has sprung, the grass has ris, I wonder where the flowers is." I think I heard that in Junior High.

Well, no flowers around here yet, but...... something has hatched!

About Licensing

Well, it's an image about licensing anyway. It's a portion of an image that will, eventually, be on a website page of licensing images. This is all in the works - amongst other things in the works. Never enough hours in the day for an illustrator!
I've always loved pattern and borders, so developing licensing images feels natural to me. Licensing imagery and illustration are like different flavors, I think. Licensing tends to be decorative, while illustration is narrative. Different flavors of artwork. And, if done well, it's all a feast for the eyes.
My friend and fellow illustrator, Paula Pertile, has just done a very informative blog post about licensing on her excellent blog, Drawing a Fine Line. Thank you for sharing all this information, Paula!

After Hours Drawing - Running Man

So .... this sketch a day, sketch a week thing isn't good for me.... or I'm not so good at it.... so far. Life is too unpredicable lately. The best I seem to be able to commit to is - sketch when I get to it. So, I've decided to call it "After Hours Drawing." Speaks for itself, I hope. To me, this means drawing in any style, any way, any how, depending on how I feel at any given moment. Who knows what will come out of my pencil? It's a good thing. This one started with a glance at a photo, in a magazine, of a guy jogging. He was a model - generic, hooded sweatshirt, blah, blah, blah. Not much drama there. Somehow or other, my drawing came out like this. Some sort of PO'd Walter Mitty thing going on here......... I think.
So, I just Googled Walter Mitty. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a Walter Mitty as "an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic daydreams of personal triumphs". Yeah! That's IT! Definitely a Walter Mitty thing, complete with the frustration of being ineffectual.
Sigh, Sad.
The original Walter Mitty was a fictional character in James Thurber's story, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

Let the Celebration Continue!

OK. It's an extremely belated holiday card. I knew it wouldn't be done until after the holiday season, but I decided to share it anyway. Another image to add to my licensing collection.

After Hours Drawing - Some Guy on TV

As part of my New Year's resolution to produce, produce, produce! - I bring you the first in my series, "Sketch a Day"....or "Sketch a Week," or "Sketch Whenever I Get Around to It." (I guess the last option kind of defeats the purpose, but.... hey! It's a start!) This was last night after I was tired of working on my unfinished post Holiday Holiday card. It's called, "SOME GUY ON TV" Actually, it looks absolutely nothing like the guy on TV, but to me, that's not the point. The point is.... uh.... OH! Yes! The point is to draw, draw, draw! I'm not particularly concerned about likenesses. In fact, I prefer non-likenesses. The guy on TV was just a jumping off point. I jumped off of his hair. Just a glimpse and then ---- see what happens on the page. Let it go wherever it goes. Preferably, NOT in the same old direction. We'll see........ Maybe next time, I'll jump off a nose, an eyelid, or a pose. Characters - it's all about new characters. Whatever catches my eye and whatever I think MIGHT lead in a little different direction. It's really ALL about challenging myself.

Featured Illustrator

As part of a showcase of End of Year Celebrations, I am a featured illustrator at PaperTiger.org. The beautiful Santa isn't mine, but you can see a piece of my work if you click "view gallery." There's a lovely review of Shante Keys and The New Year's Peas by Gail Piernas Davenport, which I illustrated for Albert Whitman. Thank you, PaperTigers! Let the End of Year Celebrations begin!

Welcome Virginia!

This is a card that I did recently. It was inspired by photos of the beautiful, brand new baby of a fellow illustrator. This is the final version with type added in Photoshop. Lots of colored pencil. This is one technique that I use. I hadn't used colored pencil for a long time. Most of what I do in color these days is painted in Alkyds. It was nice to get back to the pencils for this piece though. Below, you can see the steps to it's completion - in reverse order. I did greeting cards years ago. It was nice to get back to that too, with a little different, hopefully updated style. Updated, at least to the style that feels more like me these days - for this type of thing. Still experimenting with the ratio of paint to pencil though - as well as the type of paint.


Here's the underpainting. Light acrylic washes. I'm not good at blending acrylics, but they lay the groundwork for the next step - colored pencil. This is a bit of an experiment. Similar to the way I've worked in the distant past, but also a little different. Long technical story!


I suppose I should show the earliset versions of this sketch - much messier! That makes for a richer looking sketch, but mine tend to be so messy that they can be hard for anyone but me to read. This very clean version is what I print onto watercolor paper to produce the finish. I print at a low opacity so that nothing will show through on the final version. My earlier, messier sketch was also much more realistic. It looked like a Gerber baby. Not that there's anything wrong with that! It just felt way too realistic for me --- now.

Norman Rockwell, FDR, Lincoln and the Cider House Rules

Wonder what all of the above could have in common? They were all part of a wonderful fall weekend we just had! We visited The Norman Rockwell Museum where I learned about a connection between Rockwell and FDR. We saw Chesterwood, the country home of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial. And, we went to Ventfort, built by Sarah Morgan, sister of J.P. Morgan - where the exterior scenes for the movie The Cider House Rules were filmed.

The Norman Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Rockwell lived for the last twenty five years of his life.
There's a very interesting article about Norman Rockwell in this month's Vanity Fair. Many thanks to R. Michael Palan who brought the article to my attention at the Illustrator's Party!

This is Rockwell's studio. It was the last of 20 that he had in his life. It was originally located in the town of Stockbridge. Towards the end of his life, Rockwell donated the studio to the museum. It was cut in two and moved, on two flatbed trucks, to the grounds of the museum.

Wonderful north light! We couldn't take photos inside the studio, but if you'd like a small peak, click here.

There's so much to say about the work of Norman Rockwell that I would hardly know where to begin! And, the Vanity Fair article mentioned above says a lot! So, I'll just focus on something that I learned about this past weekend - something that I found to be extremely moving. The poster above is called the Four Freedoms. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress, giving his historic "Four Freedoms" speech. At the time, Europe was under Nazi domination. Roosevelt gave the speech to convince Congress and the country of the necessity of war and to appeal to American's most profound beliefs. Rockwell was so inspired by the speech that he created these paintings to illustrate the "Four Freedoms" theme. The paintings became part of a massive, successful U.S. war bond drive.

Here is a portion of FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech.


And commentary about the paintings from the Norman Rockwell Museum.