Ho Ho, Ha Ha

A friend of mine asked if I'd illustrated her family's Christmas card this year. Of course! Especially when she told me how she wanted her family portrayed. She asked for her husband, sister and herself sitting angelically peaceful next to a Christmas tree with her 3 yr old daughter strapped to the top dressed like an angel. LOL, so funny.

Guys With Books

Who got to meet David Shannon, Jon Scieszka, Adam Rex and Mac Barnett? That's right, I DID. And 4 nicer guys with books you shall never meet. I found out they were in San Diego about 45 minutes beforehand and I raced down to La Jolla to see them in action. They put on a fantastic presentation full of reading (but more like acting out) their books, cracking jokes and drawing crazy animal mash-ups suggested by the kids. If you ever get a chance to go to one of their presentations, I highly recommend!

Star Wars... in color!

Just painted up some of my favorite Star Wars characters and thought I'd share them with you!

Inconceivable!

If you're in Pasadena on Sat. Dec. 5th You should come join me and a bunch of awesome people at the Rialto Theater for the Hey You Guys charity event. Doors open at 6pm and at 7 there will be a screening of Ghostbusters! "When someone asks you if you're a God, you say YES." Also, there's an auction of original artwork inspired by everyone's favorite childhood movies. I'm so glad I was asked to create a piece for this great cause! All proceeds go to benefit Donor's Choose, an online charity helps teachers keep the arts alive in schools. Pretty great, huh? I'm really looking forward to it.

Use your words

Thought you might enjoy seeing this simple words puzzle set I designed/illustrated about 10 months ago. I love this kind of project. The art director basically calls me up and says, "draw a bunch of cute animals and objects... annnnnd go!" I love it, too much fun.

If you'd like to check them out on Lakeshore's website (click here and enter FF288 in the search field).

RNArrr! Walk that thar plank

Pirate may have won this time, but Ninja will have the last laugh. Oh. Yes. He. Will.

RNArrr! Life's a beach.

Meet RNArrr!

Have you ever wondered what Robots, Ninjas and Pirates do when on vacation? How do they rest and relax? Their lives can't be filled with adventure, mayhem and villainy 24/7! No no, indeed they cannot.

After much beard scratching, technobabbling and sword dueling, RNArrr! have decided that this wench can tag along and document their leisurely outings. Isn't that nice of them? Whether on holiday, surfing at the beach or jetsetting around the world, I'll be there to give YOU, the viewer, the inside scoop. Yo ho ho!

Design Inspiration Interview

There's this great site called Design Inspiration, ever heard of it? It's dedicated to interviewing professional designers and illustrators. It's really a fantastic place to learn about different creative types and find out how and why they do what they do. You can't even imagine how excited I was when Jeff Andrews asked if I'd be interested in being interviewed. Heck yes, Jeff! If you'd like to check it out and learn a little bit more about me, just click here!

Mission Viejo Readers Festival

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the Mission Viejo Readers Festival. What a wonderful event! Free to the public, presenting authors and illustrators, vendor booths, people dressed up as classic literature characters walking around and great food.

My friends from Studio 5 made an awesome presentation and had a sweet booth set up. I was honored to be invited with my pal Ken Min to join them at their booth to draw illos for the kids. Sitting beside great illustrators and interacting with kids and parents was so fun. It took me back to my time drawing caricatures at Legoland, (though this time I didn't have to dress like a pirate, haha).

Check out the members of Studio 5! Marilyn Scott-Waters, Bob Singer, J.H. Everett, Andrew Mitchell, JR Johnson,

Invasive Species

I've heard that younger siblings can be horrible pests. I'm the baby of the family so I couldn't tell you if that's true. Wait... that means I'm the pesky critter. Huh. Well? Yeah, I guess that's pretty accurate, LOL.

Just Try It

When I was sketching, I was thinking this is a fed-up nerd boy with his 2 monstrous body guards. But now I see it could also be interpreted as the toughest gang at school and this kid is the leader of the pack. Kinda funny to think that a sock and flip-flop wearing scrawny nerd is the bully. But it works either way, I guess.

This piece was fun to do. Not only designing the characters, (I love drawing monster thugs, apparently) but using the liquify tool in Photoshop. I'd never used it before and it sure is handy. It really helped when making the reflection in the floor.

SCBWILA 09

What an amazing weekend I had at the SCBWI Los Angeles conference! SO GREAT! I only recently became a member of the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators and when I heard there was a summer conference in LA I just had to go! It was 4 full days of inspiring speakers and panels, schmoozing with fellow illustrators, agents and editors and staying in a beautiful hotel room. It was so delightful that I am tempted to save my pennies and go to the winter conference in NYC. It's a great opportunity for networking and getting your work seen and your name out there. If you've never heard of SCBWI or haven't gotten involved with it yet... I highly recommend!

I created this yearbook page image as the title page to the portfolio I hefted around all weekend. I admit a few of the characters are based off of friends from high school, so if any of you Lancers notice a resemblance... uh, HA HA!

Attitude

My new business card has some attitude! Double sided glossy with rounded corners. Yum Yum snazzy.

Woah, I finished one

For the last month I've been spending a lot of my 'free' time working on some new pieces for my portfolio... a portfolio I'm hoping to showcase at the SCBWI LA conference :) I thought you might like a little sneak peek at one of them, so here it is! I like to call this one 'Groovy Grandma' because it reminds me of my Great Grandma Howels who taught me to play the piano, ride a bike and play shuffleboard. Some of my fondest memories are the times I spent with her. Ha, we used to watch Lassie and eat bon bons. Man, I miss her. She was one hip lady.

SFG: Ad boy

Here's a little ad/illo I did tonight based on the theme "Vintage Advertising Characters" over at Sugar Frosted Goodness. This was a lot of fun and I can't wait to play ultimate frisbee tomorrow!! Hooray for flying discs!

Hot Dawg!

What would a dog diner serve if ever there was a dog diner? Hot dogs, of course :)

Happy Mother's Day!

To all you mama's out there, Happy Mother's Day! I hope you are showered with hugs and kisses. And chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate. And to MY wonderful mother... You = the best. I love you!

Owls are Wise

I have 10 stories for first and second graders to illustrate this weekend. 1 down, 9 to go!

Happy Bday Dad

This post goes out to my amazing father... it's his birthday today!! Have a great one daddio, I love you :)

recent sketches

These are a couple of sketches from a project I'm working on :) Looking forward to coloring them!

lernin me some Fotosherp

I've been taking some time these past couple of weeks in Photoshop to work on my painting/coloring skilz and add to my portfolio. It took me a while, but I've finally decided to focus on digital painting as opposed to traditional painting. I LOVE watercolor, but I'm very slow at it. The benefits of digitally painting are too important at this stage in my career, I think. I value 'true' paintings so much and intend to keep up with it, but for the sake of speed, revisions and cntrl+z, I'm goint to focus on my compy generated work. I mean, who wants to spend 10-15 hours on coloring an illo and an AD to come back and say, "Love it, but we'd actually like the kid to be older." or "Um, could the dog be a cat instead?" And then you have to repaint the whole thing! I sure as heck don't want that. No sirree Bob. And besides, I like the effects/look of digital paintings. So it's all good!

Here are a couple of spot illustrations from a set of 4 I did recently (I haven't colored the remaining 2 sketches yet). Hope you like :)

Update

I finally did it! I've been meaning to buy a listing on childrenillustrators.com for a while now but couldn't find the time... UNTIL NOW! Hurray! Sure is exciting to have another place to showcase my work. Formatting all the images and thumbnails took quite a while and showed me some things I need to work on to make my portfolio stronger. I'm feeling all motivated and energized to make that port of mine more shiney :) It's on like Donkey Kong! That portfolio doesn't know what's coming. Oooo doggey.

PS: The link to my profile on childrensillustrators.com is right there --> on the right side bar. See it? You can click it if you'd like... go on, you know you want to! :P

Topps- Star Wars!!!

Yay! I can finally show you these! Drawing some of my favorite movie characters of all time was so much fun. I only did 106 Star Wars cards (unlike the 258 for Indiana Jones) because I was short on time. I wish I had done more, but oh well. Now if only Topps would ask me to do Lord of the Rings... My life would be complete! haha... I hope you enjoy these, I certainly did!

V-day

Happy Valentines Day everybodies! Seeing as how I'm gonna be helping my friend move all day tomorrow, I'm not gonna have time to post this on the real Heart day, so it's going up today. Woohoo!

Today I had a lot of fun playing with the 'live trace' tool in Adobe Illustrator. Believe it or not, I'd never used it before. Shock! Dismay! Drool! I know, I don't know how I've gone on this long without it. Fun!

Dino Time

I just found out that a few of the board games I designed last year are available for purchase on Lakeshore Learning's website (item #s LL691-LL694)! So that means I can finally show y'all, Yay! These games are targeted toward teaching kiddsies how to tell time. It was SO MUCH fun to work on this project! Dinosaurs? Atlantis? Space? Aztecs? I mean, really? Who could ask for more?

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering about the Star Wars sketch cards... you probably weren't but since I said in a previous post I'd be posting them today I figured I should update... Topps has pushed the release date to Wed, the 18th next week. If they actually keep with that date, you'll be able to find them RIGHT HERE. Ok, well not right here, cuz here is where this post is, but... um... yeah.

Bunnies!

Just finished this illo for the folks at MHoponHop. They're a non-sports trading card dealer on ebay and this illo will be used on a "thank you" card sent out with their orders. It was such a fun painting to do, thanks for asking me guys!

Topps- Indiana Jones Masterpieces... Last Crusade

And lastly, the Last Crusade. Thanks for the comments guys, I really appreciate them. I had a great time drawing these (though it took far longer than I anticipated, haha) and I'm glad you like them! I'm really looking forward to showing you my Star Wars cards, but that'll have to wait till their release date on Feb. 11. ttfn!

Topps- Indiana Jones Masterpieces... DOOM

My favorite character from Temple of Doom is Short Round. For me, he saved the movie :) I wish I could say the same for Shia Labeouf. Oh well. Last Crusade cards will be up shortly and then... Star Wars!

feeling super

I've been sick for the last 2 weeks. That's right, for both holidays I sat on the couch looking not so pretty. Oh well, I must say it was pretty relaxing because it FORCED me to do nothing. And nothing is something I don't do very well. So I got to practice doing nothing, which I guess IS something. uhhh, yeah. So anyways, now I'm feeling much better and ready to accomplish all my 2009 goals! And because I'm feeling more super-duper, I thought I'd post some not-so-recent sketches of a boy with a towel-cape tied round his neck cuz he looks super-duper :)

Oh yes, I should note that these sketches were done for the legendary Mr. Jeff Andrews over at www.jeffandrewsdesign.com/

Go 2009! Let's DO this!