Black and White

Recently, I've been trying to work a little more variety into my portfolio by playing around with black and white illustration. Don't get me wrong, I love working in color, but sometimes it's fun to mix things up by de-saturating a little bit. So, here are the four little spot illustrations I did this week.

I guess I was REALLY vibing on wrinkly dogs. 

I have a couple pieces of exciting news to share. First, my husband and I are home owners! We are now living in a beautiful townhouse in Virginia Beach, which means that, yes, I had to move. Again. But this time, it was so worth it. The house is slowly coming together; I'm ecstatic that we can paint the walls now (and not have to paint them back). We also have these stupid-gorgeous textured hardwood floors. I die a little when I look at them.

But I digress! My second piece of exciting news is that I participated in an Independent Publishing project with a really awesome couple named Danny and Kim Adlerman, who run their Independent Publishing company, "The Kids at our House." They have a number of great children's books out, all of which you can check out on their website. In the past, some of their books have later been picked up by Charlesbridge, and Lee and Low recently picked up their game Compound It All! Their latest, A Toucan Can, Can You? is the book I had the privilege of being in. The project was unique, as each spread was illustrated by a different artist, so it really was a collective effort. Two illustrators from the book I had the honor of knowing already: Leeza Hernandez (through NJ SCBWI) and Pat Cummings (my favorite teacher and mentor from Pratt), so I was thrilled to be included.

Each spread is a tougue-twister. Mine was, "How much bow could a bow tie tie if a bow tie could Tae Bo?" It was a lot of fun to do:

The color is actually coming off a little too saturated in this image, but Photoshop can only do so much when you have a little HP scanner. Don't worry, I mailed them the original art, and their scanned image for the book is WORLDS better.

The sketch I submitted to them was originally this (it was actually through an SCBWI NJ contest that I was selected):

And these were their corrections:

Here is the final comp with color added. We wound up making just a plain red border (all the spreads have a border to unify them). Also, God help me, they loved the idea of a rainbow ribbon! Just kidding, it wasn't so bad...

So check out this awesome book! You can also Like Danny and Kim on their Facebook Page!

Portfolio Re-do: Follow-up!

In my previous post I talked about re-doing a piece from my portfolio. That post is below this one, so to view the sketches, just check it out. As for the finished illustration, here it is!

I had a lot of fun painting this one. Now, if you excuse me, I have a sudden hankering for a stack of pancakes...

Portfolio Re-do

Recently, I have been pretty aggressively changing my portfolio (maybe "aggressively" is too strong an adverb, but I digress). My style has evolved a bit, and so I've been weeding out illustrations that I feel no longer represent what I do. However, there was one in particular that I still felt strongly about as an idea, so I've decided to re-do it. The original that I removed from my portfolio is below. It was a lot of fun to paint all those pancakes, but overall the illustration did not translate well from sketch to final.

By no means was it bad, it just got stiff and lost some life. The layout had some minor issues, as well. I changed some things around, and here is the new sketch:

I am in the process of painting the final now, and certain things have changed. I am adding more "messiness" and a few more flying pancakes in both the foreground and background. I also changed the frying pan/stove to a spatula/griddle to give the impression that more pancakes can be flying in the air at once as opposed to one at a time. To be continued! Wish me luck!

Make Way for Spring! (or what happens when you realize your portfolio is missing a pair of yellow rainboots)

For the past couple of years, I lived in Hawaii. It was wonderful, but there are just certain things you miss out on when you live on an island close to the equator. One of them is the changing of the seasons. There are many things I miss about Hawaii, but I am grateful that Spring is around the corner and that I can experience it again! My early onset of Spring Fever definitely inspired the idea for this illustration. Once I arranged my sketches in Photoshop, I proceeded with the final.

And a belated Happy Leap Year to you all!

Revisiting my Sketchbook: Final Illustration

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I was revisiting my sketchbook to create a new illustration. As a refresher, that sketch is here.

I messed around with color in Photoshop. Especially with a complex scene like this, it helps me plan it out. I don't always adhere totally to the original sketch or the coloring, but they are great starting points.

And this is the final:

And here are some details:

The star of the show (obviously)

This poor, poor Ice Cream Man, who I hope has great insurance

And a little someone I like to refer to as "The Real MVP"

My changes were mostly color, but I did decide in the end that the fence needed to be broken up a bit. (Enter: "The Real MVP").

A Valentine's Day Surprise

I always get really excited if I discover that another artist and I have had a similar idea (some people get discouraged, but I actually just think it's cool and a little magical). When I saw one of the three Google Doodles this Valentine's Day, I got REALLY excited.

This is actually a screenshot still of it. The actual doodle was animated. You can view them all here. 

The art was done by the immensely talented Google Doodler Kevin Laughlin, whose awesome tumbler you can view here. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Earlier this month, I made a Valentine's Day promotional postcard that I sent out. It looked like this:

(This was the back.)

If you go to my website, I have a handful of illustrations of this hedgehog searching for a Valentine, and the visual joke is that he has a "type." I got the idea from a previous sketch I did years ago (and blogged about):

This was the card I made for my husband (then, boyfriend) while he was still at bootcamp.

I always knew I wanted to revisit this character. You can check out my website to see all of the new illustrations, but here's why I got all excited yesterday:

How funny is that? We had a similar spark and just executed it differently. And for some reason, even though I had been sitting on that hedgehog sketch for a while, I got some sort of push from the Universe to expand on the idea at the beginning of 2016, almost exactly 4 years later. 

Here are the initial sketches of the pieces. Again, all the finished illustrations are on my site.

I hope you all had a Happy Valentine's Day and Presidents Day weekend!