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.

From Easter back to Christmas

I'm working on some greeting cards again. Yes, we're already working on next Christmas! This is part of a holiday card I finished recently : Christmas time in the city.

Happy Easter!

Aother promo postcard

Time to send another promo postcard to publishers. I try to send one quarterly, or at least three times a year, to drum up business. I like to use direct mail Premium Postcards from USPS because it's so easy. Just upload my art and addresses, and they take care of the rest, including postage. And there's no minimum order, which is good. I never need 500 postcards because I target my market to children's book publishers. I usually send out about 80. My agent sends out postcards, along with PBAA, too. It all helps get my work out in the marketplace. Here's my final sketch - I'll be working on painting next week.

Even more Hidden Pictures!

Work is still rather slow, so I'm doing Hidden Pictures again. I've done so many, I thought it might be fun to do a Step-by-Step post on how I come up with them. I keep just about all of my old sketches, so sometimes I dig out one of them to use as a starting point.

I've enlarged the original sketch a bit and altered it to fit the required size. Then I traced over it, adding a tent, animals in the woods and clothes to the bears. I was going to dress them as Scouts with "Smokey" hats, but thought that might infringe on Smokey the Bear copyrights, so...just regular clothes. Now I have the basic subject matter for the puzzle.

Now for the fun, or tricky part. I have to hide about 18 objects in the scene, things that wouldn't normally be there, like a leaf. I can find shapes in the drawing... like a triangle becomes a party hat. I trace over, simplify lines, and add more lines and shapes to confuse kids!

The final sketch! Now I send it off to Highlights and see if they accept it!