Things are Brewing!

November was a terribly busy month. Aside from the usual holiday hubbub, our family had dealings with the swine flu. But on a better note, I won an illustration contest and won an award in a national art exhibit! Also, my husband and I started a new hobby... wine making!

The contest was to develop three Gypsy Cob horses into an Anime format using colors requested by the sponsor. And it looks like I will be working on future projects with these horses and the products their images adorn.

The exhibit is with the Miniature Art Society of Florida. "Hutch Bunny" won Best Work By a First Time Entrant. The opening is January 16 in Tarpon Springs, Florida at the Leeper-Rattner Museum of Art.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving... there is so much to be thankful for!

Kana characters

I've done a few more poses of Kana, my little Hawaiian girl for my story. These are just line drawings. Doing quick sketches is forcing me to learn to cartoonize people without fear of messing up. If it turns out, I will use it... if not, I'll move onto the next one, or work on improving it. So far I really like her!

And now for something completely different...

I've been challenged by my illustrator friends... a drawing a day of a new little character! I am playing with software called Corel Painter 11. And loving it! Here are the first two drawings. This should help tremendously to develop my almost non-existent  cartooning skills, which are very necessary for illustrating my children's stories.

Upcoming Exhibits for September 09

"Fission of Form" is a collaborative exhibit being held at Panza Gallery, Millvale PA. 20 members of the Pittsburgh Society of Sculptors created 3D works; 20 members of the Pittsburgh Poets each took home a sculpture for 2 months and allowed it to inspire them. Then 20 members of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators (I'm one of them) were each assigned a poem, without seeing the sculpture on which it was based, and created an illustration. My painting was inspired by the poem "I Hugged My Death Like a Child." The opening is on September 5, at 7 pm.

The next exhibit is Art in the Garden, at the Le Moyne House in Washington, PA. It is a show of small works only, being held on Sunday September 13, 2-6 pm in the gardens of the Historical Society (the Le Moyne House.) It really is a lovely affair, with wine and music and a wide variety of work by many wonderful local artists. Both my Fox miniatures will be there!

Finding a vision

I wrote a children's story and decided I wanted to illustrate it myself. The first "vision" I had of these illustrations was oils done in the tradition of my fine art. This is my first:

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I really liked the ominious presence of the crow, but after coming upon a book about Arthur Rackham, I fell in love with idea of the sepia tones in watercolor, with ink. I felt it fit the time frame of the story, seeing as our main character is Escar Gogh, the artist snail, and the story is full of puns set against paintings of Van Gogh's. This is my second vision:

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After a rousing critique by an art director and a room full of published illustrators, I realized that the main character, the snail, was out of sync with the look of everything else. He looked too cute and coloring-bookish. And the heirloom look just wasn't going to sell to publishers. A more modern approach was needed... more humor. Maybe even some down right silliness. So this is my final vision (without color... I'm still working on that.) The crow will not be that fatal black; he'll just be a ratty grey. The snail has more attitude and character. The coloration of the background will be loose and not so serious. I've also changed the type of snail... he was a pond snail with a shell that, honestly, reminded me of a pile of dog poo. Now he is an Apple snail with a shell that follows the Golden Mean . (It's a mathematical formula created by God to design many things in nature, such as the petals on a sunflower, or the spiral of a shell. It is also used by many master painters to determine the composition of their masterpieces.)