Blog o' the Baroness 2.0

New Year's Check-In

2012-01-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

Happy New Year Internets!

Was thinking I should post some artwork, but don't really have anything I feel like showing, or am allowed to show, or have access to at the moment, so here is a drawing I did when maybe I was, oh, four? That's the last time I had long blond hair, so thinking then. Though one doesn't write with cursive at four and I don't remember being a genius so... hmmm. Mystery.

And here is my New Year's weekend project. I rearranged and organized my studio for a better workflow. Put up those shelves, and my encaustic space is ready to go. Just need to catch up on some other things, and then I will be a paintin' fool!

And finally, I was going to include a screenshot from Maryn's Laser Adventure, but looks like the DVD won't let me. So here is a drawing of what it looks like. Oh man did I stare hard at that little red light. My Merry Christmas gift to myself: Lasik Eye Surgery! It's been a week and a half, and it's fantastic! At last check-in my right eye was 20/20 and my left was 20/25. I do not for one second miss my glasses. Hooray for shooting laser beams into my face!

And that's it for now. I have a few projects percolating, work at Imagine Learning as usual, and my sweet encaustic set-up calling my name. Things to do, things to do!

Here's to a busy year!

feliz dia de los muertos!

2011-11-01T08:17:00.000-06:00

Hope y'all had a fabulous Halloween! I took a couples hours off from freelance to paint a happy skull. This is my latest encaustic painting, an experiment with accretion: basically lots of layers of drybrushing.

I've been taking an online encaustic course from the lovely and talented Judy Wise, which has been fabulous. We're in the middle of four weeks of daily lessons, which makes me super excited to go home from work and paint every night. Unfortunately the freelance has to come first, so haven't done much for the class. Hopefully I will have some more time to paint soon.

Here's another I did last week for the class. The assignment was color mixing and carbon transfer. I only had white saral paper, which didn't show up well, so I tried a bunch of other things... blobby lines as a result, but it's fun. I quite enjoy the idea of Gary the Chicken Whisperer.

Feliz dia de los muertos and a happy november to you all!

Booster's Costume Creator

2011-10-27T21:31:00.001-06:00

I better post this before it's actually Halloween! I did the artwork for this fun little ecard deal at Imagine Learning. Pick from two of the Imagine Learning characters, then click to change their costume and background. Then send it to a friend! Or lots of friends! Or casual acquaintances!

I always love doing these flipbook sorts of things. It's a fun challenge to get all the pieces to work together properly, plus, gotta love making costumes. We decided to make it a little "educational" - each character got three historical figure costumes plus one halloween-style costume, plus one Imagine Learning character costume. So much fun to make.

The rest of the Marketing team did a great job with the opening sequence, the site design, music, programming, writing, they are a great bunch to work with. Thanks guys!

halloween sneak peak

2011-10-11T11:14:00.000-06:00

Six years in a row I had a super out-of-control Halloween Party. Last year I was too swamped with work and still recovering from gallbladder surgery that I decided to take a year off. This year, the schedule is still full, I recently moved and have no time to even think about excavating all the Halloween decor from the depths of unpacked boxes... so another year off. I will be in some serious Halloween withdrawal by next year. So plan for quite the extravaganza in 2012. Unless the world ends first. Then we'll all be enjoying the Zombie Apocalypse together.

But I got a pretty good Halloween fix this year. I got to work on a super fun Halloween-themed project at Imagine Learning. Here's a little sneak peek. Stay tuned, the rest should be out next week.

ps: for pics of Halloween parties past, check out The Two-Headed Goose blog.

TIKI KABOOOOM!

2011-10-07T21:08:00.001-06:00

Tiki Kaboom! It's live! My first iPhone game is now available on iTunes. Some genius friends of mine designed and programmed this super addictive game and asked me to help them with the artwork. So I got to draw some tikis. Never a hardship.

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click HERE for the free version.

Or click HERE for the full version with more levels and features.

Still not sure? Here's the Facebook page to check out.

Have fun!

summer vacation over

2011-09-04T19:36:00.000-06:00

Hello friends out there in the internets! How have you been? I've been swell, thanks for asking.

So what have I been up to lately? Oh lots. Moved, tried to take a break from freelance while I got settled into the new place. That didn't last very long, and I am once again up to the eyeballs in work. Always a good thing, especially since now I think about things like: I need a new fence! Got to save money for a new garage door opener!

Above is an illustration I did for The Friend Magazine. Always happy when they call with an assignment. They are great to work with. Mostly what I remember about this illustration though, was hurrying to get it finished and sent off before heading out to see U2. Awesome concert!

Currently working on lots of different things, two of which are new types of projects for me. One is an interactive book for ipad, iphone, etc. I'll post a link when it is released. Another is an actual game for the iphone. Also will plug the heck out of it when it goes live.

Speaking of promoting stuff... new book to be released Sept 29:

new house!

2011-05-22T17:10:00.000-06:00

Oh yeah, I have a blog. So I've been a little busy lately. I bought a house! My first ever house. It's fabulous. It's a simple little 1961 brick rambler, with a walk-out basement. The basement is essentially a crafty arty wonderland. I have a great office space with an adjacent patio, a workshop, and a room for encaustic painting. Oh the projects I can make! Will update as spaces become functional.

sweet pea benefit boutique

2011-04-11T20:01:00.000-06:00

Want to amaze and impress your friends by owning an actual encaustic painting? Or how about all five Sugarplum Ballerina books when the fifth book isn't even out yet? You can do these things and more at the Sweet Pea Benefit Boutique!

The Sweet Pea Benefit Boutique is a charity auction whose funds will go to help pay for fertility treatments for a couple of folks, one being my pal Devanie. Go check out all the cool things for auction! Bid lots! Devanie needs a baby. :)

hmong rhymes for good times

2011-03-29T17:30:00.004-06:00

Things that rhyme in Hmong:

Hawk. Net. Frog.

Fish. Car. House.

dueling banjo pigs: the exhibit

2011-03-27T09:38:00.001-06:00

Come check out Dueling Banjo Pigs: The Exhibit. Opening reception is this Friday! Between Guy and Stacy they'll have about 40 banjo pig paintings there. I'll have 7, plus lots more from folks from all over. Hope to see you there!

Dueling Banjo Pigs: The Blog

happy st patrick's day!

2011-03-17T08:19:00.000-06:00

hiring artists at imagine learning

2011-02-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Howdy out there! We are hiring for two art positions at Imagine Learning (among other things) - a full-time senior illustrator and a part-time junior illustrator. You can check out the job listings and descriptions here.

Feel free to pass the word along - thanks!

Oh, and the my little pony version of the taj mahal has nothing to do with the job hunt... just part of my latest project at Imagine Learning. :)

imagine learning office + art!

2011-01-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what the Imagine Learning offices look like? We moved to a new building about a year ago and it's pretty fancy. We just hung up 6 foot prints in the halls, which was interesting since the original artwork was originally done at 600x800 pixels! The picture above is of encaustic paintings of the level one characters I did for the lobby. That was fun. In the article you'll see other art done by Jim and Nate for the lobby. Nate's "bronze" booster is pretty awesome and Jim's portraits of the Level Two characters turned out great.

All this and more at the Imagine Learning Blog:

The best-decorated classrooms and a tour of Imagine Learning

season's greetings (from imagine learning)

2010-12-16T21:15:00.001-07:00

Another Imagine Learning post! Here's a little video I helped the Marketing Department put together over the past few days.

Season's Greetings!

how to draw booster + interview

2010-12-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

I've recently had two little articles/features at the Imagine Learning Blog. First is one of those how-to-draw deals. I tried to make it so it wasn't step one, step two, step three, then something magical happens and step four it looks all finished.

So head on over here to learn how to draw Booster!

The second blog post is a short little interview. Every month they are planning to spotlight one of the writers or artists or someone, so it was my turn this time around.

So go here to read my very important thoughts about important things.

the lesser-known pork banjo cut

2010-11-30T18:57:00.001-07:00

just a quick little encaustic painting that i've been meaning to get done for awhile. finally took a few minutes to finish it up. hooray for banjo pigs - they can't be stopped!

for the how-to portion of the post... i painted some layers of pink then purple and fused it all flat. then i took a needle stylus and incised all the lines in the wax. then i took some pink and yellow oil sticks and rubbed them into the lines wiping away all the excess paint. presto magico: a banjo pig!

encaustic painting demo nov 19

2010-11-17T21:41:00.001-07:00

This Friday at the Reagan Academy in Springville, Utah I will be participating in the Art and Gift Basket Auction. I'll be doing an encaustic painting demo from 6-8 and whatever I make will be auctioned off at the end. All proceeds will go to the school. So if you're curious about encaustic painting, want to bid on some awesome gift baskets, or just like hanging out at a middle school gymnasium on a friday night - come on by!

So what is encaustic you might be wondering? It is the method of painting with melted beeswax combined with resin and pigment. It dates all the way back to ancient greece. When I have a bit more time, I'll put together a more comprehensive tutorial.

For the past year I've been learning all about encaustic painting, but I'm still quite the novice. I've taken three workshops so far, and have done a little bit of practicing here and there, but haven't had much time to devote to it. So these samples are no great works, but some of the experiments that have turned out maybe not so bad.

This is my studio. You can see the skillet is full of melted encaustic medium (beeswax and damar resin). There is a sheet of aluminum with a hot plate underneath to use as a palette. You have to have good ventilation: the contraption on the middle left. The torch in the foreground is for fusing. You have to heat every layer of paint to fuse it to the previous ones.

Encaustic is super versatile. You can have lots of texture or be smooth as glass like the painting at the very top.

You can use it for collage or embedding objects. This was an experiment where I poured the wax over little scrolls of paper.

This was from a class where I learned about layering and using oil paint in between those layers.

One of the coolest things about encaustic is the translucent quality of the wax. You can play around with layers and easily create depth. This was a really early experiment. I hadn't quite gotten the hang of fusing. I sort of over-melted those trees which is why they are a little mushy and feathery in spots. I also hadn't yet figured out how to paint details, so the little red riding hood is a print-out collaged into the wax.

So if you find yourself in Utah Valley this Friday Nov 19 - drop on by the Reagan Academy and say "Hi!"

Ronald Reagan Academy
1143 West Center Street
Springville, UT

art demos and silent auction 6-8
live art auction 8-9

little wonder tv spot

2010-11-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Leslie Sell, CEO of The Little Wonder Company, was on a local Minneapolis tv show touting the Little Wonder Custom Children's Books. I did the illustrations for these last year, with some additional attributes a couple months ago. A nice segment, and hopefully lots and lots of sales for Leslie! ('tis the season after all!) Go check out the site and you can even build your own character.

gnomey and deerie

2010-11-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

just a little sumpin sumpin i've been working on today. some more puppets to animate in aftereffects.

cantonese rhyming powers activate!

2010-11-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

So I know I'm crap at "dramatic lighting" but I tried anyway. Here is a rhyme scene for the words apple, lock and fire. They rhyme...in Cantonese.

banjo pig in motion!

2010-11-09T10:38:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to learn AfterEffects forever, and finally getting some time at work to do some training. Here's my attempt at trying to figure out how to animate. hooray for banjo pigs!

bookster

2010-10-17T21:17:00.000-06:00

Last week Imagine Learning released its first iPad/iPhone app called BOOKSTER. And it's FREE!

Blurb from the website: Launch your kids into literacy with Bookster, the read-along storytelling app that reads to your kids, records and plays their voices, and teaches vocabulary along the way.

So go download it from ye ol' iTunes store. Just do a search for "Bookster" and it should pop up. More books to come in the future. The first free book happens to be one I did ooooooh so many years ago. I don't like to look at it or think about it. ;-) One of those things that makes me itch to redo. But it's a fun story, and kids have fun recording and listening to themselves read the story. And don't forget: it's FREE!

http://itunes.com/apps/bookster

terrible terrell (sugar plum #4!)

2010-10-03T17:46:00.000-06:00

Sugar Plum Ballerinas #4: Terrible Terrell is being released this week. Go and buy! You'll feel better about yourself and people will like you.

rejected character design

2010-09-28T17:52:00.000-06:00

The levitating bunny. Rejected in favor of a different animal, although it's all good. The new character still inexplicably levitates, and really, that's what's important here.

imagine learning picspam

2010-09-07T07:44:00.000-06:00

Last week at Imagine Learning, we celebrated hitting the $50 Million total revenue milestone. Pretty awesome for a little company that started up 6 years ago. It's a great company, and I love working there. I thought I'd post a few things I've done there recently, which also serves as an example of why I like it there so much. I am given pretty much free reign to do my illustrations in whatever style suits my fancy (and is appropriate, etc.). And for someone like me who is always trying something different, it's perfect.

For a small story about endangered seahorses.

A book about seed dispersion.

Sometimes I even get to write my own books, which is pretty cool.

Just an inhouse thing, but fun to do our product Level 1 characters in a slightly different style.

So there you go. I keep thinking I'm going to do some tutorials, or post about encaustic painting, but I'm realizing that it isn't going to happen anytime soon - especially since I just lost two weeks recovering from gallbladder surgery. Freelance has me swamped through the end of the year. Guess I can't complain about that!

Happy Drawing!

gallbladder begone!

2010-09-01T09:23:00.000-06:00

After sharing the state of my massively diseased gallbladder, a friend challenged me to draw a cute one. Gallbladder free for a week now, and feelin' fine! Good riddance!

i like to draw vines

2010-08-04T20:36:00.001-06:00

illustration in the current issue of the friend magazine. quite enjoyed working on this one.

yes, i did draw all those leaves and vines individually, but cheated on the flowers. ran out of time. :-)

awwwww. missing banjo

2010-08-02T11:41:00.000-06:00

imagine learning on the news

2010-07-18T19:24:00.001-06:00

A little slow to post this, but there was a nice little piece on KSL a week or so ago about Imagine Learning. Go and watch. :-)

ksl.com - Utah company's program helping kids learn English quickly

A big chunk of what I post on this blog is from Imagine Learning. And I just celebrated my official 5 year anniversary - love working there! Last week was crazy times at ol' IL. Every year we have Vision Conference in which the whole company gets together for fun, training, motivation, all that good stuff. More often than not I am on the committee putting on the conference, which is a ton of work, but all good.

We recently moved into a new building, and decided to use it as the game board of a live version of Clue. We had 120 people running around the building trying to solve the murder. Pretty fun. The committee members were the suspects, and I personally was "Doctor" Maryn (the turquoise one). We made a full set of customized cards, and the game actually worked (you never really know with this kind of stuff.) Above are actually not the final versions of the suspects card illustrations, but close enough...

Anyway, good fun, and now hopefully my schedule is back to its regular craziness.

just a wild and crazy swine

2010-07-01T09:02:00.000-06:00

banjo pig 3 - big banjo, little pigs

2010-06-30T11:23:00.000-06:00

It's addicting.

chubby dragon, scourge of the bayou

2010-06-25T11:36:00.000-06:00

dueling banjo pigs

2010-06-24T10:07:00.000-06:00

It started a few weeks back - Super Star illustrators Guy Francis and Stacy Curtis started doing this dueling banjo pigs thing. Which grew and grew and now even has its very own Dueling Banjo Pigs Blog.

A little late but jumping on the bandwagon nonetheless. A quick drawing of a happy lil' pig with his happy lil' banjo!

friendly treehouse

2010-06-18T10:10:00.000-06:00

Here's the cover illustration I did for this month's The Friend Magazine - always love working those. I was supposed to come up with something with a dad and kid(s), so here ya go. And a lovely Happy Father's Day to all those dads out there!

tagalog rhyme scenes

2010-05-19T17:11:00.000-06:00

Okay. I'll stop with the teases. Here are the two rhyming scenes I did for Tagalog. The top one is a scene for the words family, butter and chair. You can see how the scene needed to have tarsiers...

The second scene had to include: fingernail, coconut (of the green variety) and the verb to bow. We checked and it was okay to use the fancy fingernail covers for fingernail. Kinda went crazy with the texture layers and indulged my spiral doodling. This would probably be a good one to do a tutorial for - I'll keep that idea on the back burner for when I have a few spare minutes.

another tagalog sneak peak

2010-05-18T09:41:00.001-06:00

mmmmm. butter.

from the same scene as previously posted. ooooo. mysterious mystery. actually, nothing all that spectacular about this illustration, just having fun building anticipation! can you feel the anticipation???

:-)

tagalog sneak peek

2010-05-10T12:29:00.000-06:00

Working on another rhyme scene, this time for Tagalog. I'm probably about halfway done with the whole illustration, but here's a sneak peek. It's a tarsier!

provo children's book festival

2010-05-09T12:48:00.000-06:00

Heya rockstars!
You know, whenever I have a new resolve to post more often, it ends up going a few months before the next post. Maybe I jinx myself with ambitious thoughts... heh. Actually truth is I've just been really really busy. My newest obsession has been Encaustic Painting (painting with hot wax). Been experimenting with that a little, even took a workshop in San Francisco a couple months ago, although I haven't touched it since then. When I get through this latest batch of deadlines, I'll post some more about it.

But moving on to the main point of this post! This Saturday, May 15, I'll be representin' at the Provo Children's Book Festival. I'll be there 1-5 in the Illustrator's Corner with Guy Francis, Nathan Hale, Sherry Meidell and Julie Olson. I think we'll be drawing and stuff - should be lots of fun. So if you are in the neighborhood, drop by!

And finally, this illustration was for The Friend last year. It was a book review article (see: relevance!). Just a stop sign guy, but I really like how it turned out for whatever reason. For those who get The Friend, I did the upcoming June cover - so watch for it! That was a lot of fun to do.

Toodles!

sugar plums for charity

2010-01-24T23:00:00.001-07:00

I've posted the rest of my auctions on eBay (for now) for Red Cross. There are some Sugar Plum books listed, and if you win, I will sign the books, personalize them if you like, and draw a picture in them as well. Fun! And 100% of the proceeds go to charity.
Thanks!

red cross auction - star wars concept art

2010-01-22T10:07:00.002-07:00

Heya folks! I've got a couple things I'll be posting on eBay, 100% of the proceeds will go to Red Cross. The first is an old sketch I did back in the Lucas Learning days. Also, I've got a couple Sugar Plum items I'll be posting over the next few days.

For Haiti: Star Wars Video Game Concept Art

So bid lots, or pass along the word to any Star Wars fan you may know who might be interested. Thanks!
:-)

sugar plum ballerina news round-up

2010-01-11T10:45:00.002-07:00

First of all, a big congratulations again to Deborah Underwood, Whoopi Goldberg and the folks at Jump at the Sun for another NAACP image award nomination. Sugar Plum Ballerinas #2 Toeshoe Trouble was nominated for Outstanding Literary Work - Children. Sweet!

Second: the third of the series, Perfectly Prima was released last week. Go buy it. :-) I actually just sent off the cover for book #4 last week as well. I think it should be out more towards the end of the year. Spoiler Alert! Book #4 is Tangerine.

And finally, I'm not sure how long this has been out there, but just discovered that there is an official Sugar Plum Ballerinas website. There are a couple little games, wallpapers and chapter excerpts, things like that.

EDIT: And one last thing - just saw that Whoopi will be on Letterman tomorrow night. Awesome sauce.

little wonder company

2009-12-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to the website of a project I worked on recently:

Little Wonder Company.

You can go in and make a custom character to look like your kid, and then order a book with your character in it.

Check out the Character Creator - pretty fun to play around with the different colors and hairstyles...

mythy icons

2009-12-04T18:22:00.006-07:00

after making lots of random supah-cute icons, decided to go with a mythological theme. i quite enjoyed making these. and that is the friendliest cerberus i ever did see. i think it's related to huckleberry hound.

but just got a new project, so we bring a close to icon week. get to try my hand at a graphic novel. we'll see how that goes...

happy hamster time

2009-12-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

it's a jelly

2009-12-01T17:38:00.001-07:00

Been making little avatar icons at work. Yesterday and today were all about the Cute. I like how the jelly fish turned out.

flying machine

2009-11-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Another Imagine Learning thing. I was supposed to illustrate an example of an early flying machine. So that's what I did. See how that worked? :)

another rhyme scene

2009-11-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

Another one of those rhyme scenes, this time for Vietnamese. The three words are: flower, hair and peacock.

things that rhyme in russian but not in english

2009-11-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

What? New art? Yeah, so... the past 5 or 6 months or so have been crazy busy, and regrettably for the poor blog, kind of forgot about it. But here! Some illustrations I did a couple months ago for Imagine Learning. There is an activity that the artists love called Intro to Rhyme. Every time we add a new support language, we get to make more rhyme scenes.

Basically you get three random words that rhyme in the other language and have to figure out how to put them all in a scene. This time around we added Russian, and I got to do two of the five scenes. The top scene: tomato, meteor and hallway. Second scene: car, tire, picture.

mud tacos out today

2009-10-15T00:04:00.003-06:00

um, yeah... so I do still exist! I'll try to post some new work soon. In the meantime, Mud Tacos is out today - there's even a nifty contest (and a swell little video where you can see some of the book):

http://extratv.warnerbros.com/2009/10/mario_lopez_mud_taco_win_book_copy.php

Provo Children's Book Festival

2009-05-12T09:48:00.003-06:00

Hey! So I've been invited to participate in the Provo Children's Book Festival this year at the Academy Library. Come visit. I'll be there all day. I'll be hanging with Guy Francis in the Children's Circle, drawing and stuff, starting 1 pm. And then I think my book signing time is 1:30 to 3:30 or something like that. Which is really a whole lot o' time for the one, maybe two books I'll be signing... ;-)

Provo Children’s Book Festival
Provo City Library at Academy Square
Saturday, May 16, 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
550 North University Avenue

sugar plum #2 media blitz

2009-05-04T11:49:00.003-06:00

The next book in the Sugar Plum Ballerinas series is out tomorrow (May 5). There was a mention on The View this morning - sorry, you missed it!

Other Whoopi Goldberg appearances this week:
May 5: Good Morning America (ABC)
May 7: Larry King Live (CNN)

There is also a little excerpt posted at ABC.com

Go Sugar Plum Power!

5.5.09 Edit:
Go here to see the clip from Good Morning America.

mud tacos announced

2009-04-25T22:23:00.003-06:00

No, I haven't joined a Mario Lopez fan club. But I am quite personally invested in his latest project. I just found out that there's a little article about it in a recent edition of Publishers Weekly.

Here's a little excerpt:

Actor Mario Lopez, host of EXTRA and America’s Best Dance Crew, has become the latest celebrity to pen a children’s book. Along with his sister Marissa Lopez-Wong, he has signed with Celebra Children’s Books, a Penguin imprint, for a picture book called Mud Tacos!, which will be published on October 15. Maryn Roos, who did the artwork for Whoopi Goldberg’s Sugar Plum Ballerinas, will illustrate, and Steve Meltzer, associate publisher and executive managing editor of Dial and Dutton, will edit the book.

tarot card charms

2009-04-15T22:21:00.003-06:00

Last year as I was hunting for Day of the Dead decorations for my big party, I ran across an amazing Frida Kahlo charm necklace, and had to have it. A few months ago, I was thinking about this year's theme (fortune teller) and thought it would be cool to have a fortune teller charm bracelet in the same style.

The jewelry-maker was happy to make one for me, and it arrived today. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. So if you are a fan of charm bracelets, check out Lulu's eBay store: Lulu's Lovely Loot.

sugar plums on leno

2009-03-11T23:36:00.002-06:00

Thanks to the ever fabulous Amy Gordon for the Hulu clip clipping tip.

scholastic lucky books

2009-03-04T17:25:00.003-07:00

A fun little promotional video on the Scholastic site. Sugarplum Ballerinas starts about 2:14.

UVSC (uvu) Forum on Children's Literature

2009-02-27T13:02:00.003-07:00

Children's Literature Forum 2009

Go to that link and you will see that I am one of the presenters or speakers or whatever we are called. I'll be there Friday March 13 and talking mostly about illustrating chapter books. I've never done a big important presentation like this before, so hopefully it won't be horrible and painful for those attending. If anyone attends my presentation... oh no. The paranoia has set in.

chibi/anime nick

2009-02-12T17:12:00.006-07:00

Finally! Something not from years ago. This is a project that's still in progress, but here are some samples of the character art. It's been fun to take an existing character (see bottom sample) and then turn him into a sort of anime-type style. I don't know anything about anime or manga but when we were designing the game, and the main character Nick was going to be doing some crazy martial arts stuff, I figured transforming him into an anime type character was really the only way to go.

Then I was supposed to make some icons for happy and unhappy, and instead of a plain ol' boring smiley face, why not make a crazy big-eyed chibi version of Nick? Naturally! Too much fun making those big shiny goopy eyes.

hamm & facebook

2009-02-04T19:04:00.003-07:00

About a month ago I wrote about my anti-Facebook stance. Well, a couple weeks ago, after being reassured it wasn't scary, I decided to face down my paranoia and fear of social networking sites and signed up for Facebook. I've never been terribly skilled or interested in networking (that's why I have a rep!) but it's turning out to be pretty cool. So I figured I better mention my turnaround if people find me on Facebook after my mild dissing of said site. :)

Also, I thought I'd give a little illustration world update. I always seem to be mentioning that I'm too busy for this, too busy for that, but all I seem to post are random things I did years ago. Mostly that is because I'm never quite sure what I'm allowed to post or not, so I tend to err on the safe side. But to give a taste of what's coming up, I have two more Whoopi chapter books as well as two picture books coming out this year. I'll post more on each as it comes closer to their release dates.

To continue with the celebrity theme - above is a sample I did (5 years ago) for a possible book written by soccer star Mia Hamm. Didn't get the project, but here is the sample for you to enjoy! This is from back in the day when I actually did a pencil drawing first and scanned it.

missing links and abandoned sketches

2009-02-02T22:29:00.004-07:00

I was doing a search for some elf reference and my little elf illustration came up a few times, and I noticed that the links are all broken. I moved web servers about a month ago, and I guess I didn't quite transfer everything, so most of the pictures posted at the old baronesss blog are gone. Sorry about that. I'll get to fixing it sometime, but that might not be for awhile. Too many other things higher up on the priority list.

When I was looking to see if I had a handy backup available (didn't) I found this little sketch. It was going to be for a logo for a kids organization in Brooklyn. The job sort of fizzled and never went anywhere, and I forgot about it until now. I kind of like the kids. Maybe I'll finish it someday.

Wat Tambor (he's a Star Wars dude)

2009-01-25T20:03:00.002-07:00

I've been scouring old archived dvd's and hard drives trying to find an old photo I need to an upcoming book catalog. As a result, I've been stumbling across a lot of old random bits of art. I just found this little Flash illustration I had completely forgotten about.

A few years back I worked at a little place called Lucas Learning. I came on about a year before Star Wars Episode 1, and worked on related products for several years. Let's just say, while I absolutely loved working there, I don't ever need to see that movie ever again. I also had access to a lot of random background information to characters that were onscreen for maybe 3 seconds. I used to be able to tell you the names of all 24 pod racers and where they came from and who wanted to kill whom, and who was into karaoke (seriously).

Anyway, above is one of those random background dudes from Star Wars. I had to look him up just now to remember who he was, and I guess not so surprised to see he even has his own action figure. Go Wat Tambor.

Click on the button on his chest for a surprise!

NAACP Image Award Nomination

2009-01-07T17:42:00.003-07:00

Found out today that Plum Fantastic has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work - Youth/Teens.

Congratulations to Whoopi and Deborah and all the folks at Jump at the Sun!

new year's resolutions

2009-01-02T22:28:00.006-07:00

Happy New Year!

So one of my resolutions for the new year is to go nuts selling stuff on eBay. I'm hoping to move before the end of the year, and it would be ever so lovely to downsize quite a bit before having to pack everything. Earlier today I set up my own little table-top photo studio and tried to remember how to use my camera.

I've learned that I still need to figure out the whole depth of field/aperture stuff but I think I've got the lighting working pretty well. Also, I need to steam the fabric and get rid of all the wrinkles. (How tacky!) But mostly I learned that I really need to do a better job of dusting my belongings! Ouch.

Anyway, probably in a few weeks or so I'll have a store up on eBay. I may have the occasional bit of art to sell, so I'll be sure to post on the blog whenever that happens, otherwise it's mostly going to be normal house stuff. Oh - and btw, the above items are not for sale, they were just handy for taking some photos.

season's greetings and stuff

2008-12-24T13:01:00.003-07:00

Once again, I didn't quite get it together to send out Christmas Cards, much less paint something new for a card.... so I grabbed some pieces from a job I did last year for Home Depot and made this nice little seasonal salutation for y'all. I think I did the lines in Flash and then colored everything in Photoshop. I had to make elf heads and bodies and hands and arms all interchangeable for the ad people to set them up however they wanted. I never did see the final set up, but it was supposed to be a big end cap for cleaning supplies, hence in my files these are called the Swiffer Elves. :-)

Have a wonderful season of festivities, and I wish a wonderful new year to you all!
-Maryn

interesting internet facts

2008-12-20T22:20:00.005-07:00

So every once in a while, it's fun to Google your own name to see what comes up. It's interesting, and maybe a touch creepy. Taking a little break from some sketches, I thought I'd see what came up. I learned some interesting things.

1. Apparently there is another Maryn Roos out there with a Facebook account. I don't have the time or inclination to deal with Facebook or MySpace or sites like that, and the whole friend thing makes me uncomfortable. But I wonder who the other Maryn Roos is. I wonder if she's the good version, and that makes me the evil bizarro Maryn.

2. Apparently I have a middle name, and it is Boyde. Huh. When I little, I was always self-conscious over the fact I didn't have a middle name. I have kid drawings where I wrote different middle names all the time. Guess I was trying them out. The favorite that seemed to stick was Rosie, and all through college I would sign my paintings M. Rosie Roos. The Boyde bit isn't that out there though - my dad's middle name was Boyde, so somehow it's gotten attached to me. I actually get junk mail for Maryn B Roos all the time.

3. I stumbled across an illustration I did earlier this year in someone else's portfolio. (It's all legit - no worries.)

4. A website all about wine sells my books.

And that's enough of that diversion for the evening. Back to work so I can enjoy some free time over the holidays! Also, above are some illustrations from The Can Dance, a book for Imagine Learning. Can't have a post without a picture of something...

*bonus points if you can correctly guess the actual city used for the map in the top illustration.

Friendly Miscellany

2008-12-10T20:09:00.008-07:00

Hey - finally something not Sugar Plum related! And some of it even seasonally relevant!

Above is an illustration I did for the December issue of The Friend magazine - always a great job. The initial illustration was done in Flash. Different layers were then imported into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I did a bit more shading to the solid areas than I have before. I think I like how it turned out. I like the flatter style as well though (see below).

This batch is from another article from The Friend. I think this was from the August issue maybe? I forgot. Done the same way - initially in Flash, then the layers are taken into Photoshop. A few touch-ups are added like rosy cheeks, plus a shadow is added by way of the Layers Blending Options. And finally a nice texture is put over the top of the whole thing.

And btw, moral of the story, in case you didn't piece it together: Stealing is Bad! :-)

rachel ray and toeshoe troubles

2008-11-10T22:02:00.003-07:00

I suppose I should post something other than Sugar Plum Ballerinas news, but I don't really have any other news at the moment. Halloween is over, I'm loaded up with work as usual, and I'm trying to learn how to live in a world without dairy. Hallelujah there's no lactose in Diet Coke....

A bit short notice, Whoopi Goldberg will be on Rachel Ray promoting Sugar Plum Ballerinas on Tues, Nov 11.

And the cover for the second Sugar Plum book: Toeshoe Troubles, can now be seen at amazon.com (or if you're really clever, you can see it in this very same blog!) For those who read the first book (it is a really cute book - go buy it!) that's Brenda on the cover, with her snotty cousin Tiffany.

#3 on the new york times

2008-11-07T08:54:00.004-07:00

Just got the word, Plum Fantastic has debuted at #3 on next week's NYT bestseller list, in the children's paperback category.

How cool!

Also in Sugar Plum Ballerina news, book #2: Toeshoe Trouble, is planned for May 2009 release, and the third book to follow Winter 2010.

And finally, Barnes and Noble has a short little video interview with Whoopi Goldberg at their site. It shows a few of the interior illustrations.

sugar plums in the news

2008-10-23T07:56:00.004-06:00

They have a clip of Whoopi's interview, and the first chapter of the book posted at Good Morning America's website.

She didn't mention the book on The View on Tuesday like I'd been told, but have since heard that will happen today, plus audience giveaway!

Edit:
Sugar Plum mention on The View:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUdU_4V1-Oc

more sugar plums

2008-10-21T11:37:00.002-06:00

So I thought I'd have my own little media blitz here at the ol' blog, and post some more about the Sugar Plum books.

I'm often asked how I got hooked up with these books, and how Whoopi Goldberg became my BFF. First of all, I'm sure she's a lovely woman, but alas, as we have never met, no friendship bracelets have been exchanged. All of my interaction is with the fine folks at Jump at the Sun Publishing, an imprint of Hyperion Books, owned by Disney, who also owns ABC, on which airs Ms. Goldberg's show The View. Not sure any of that was important, but it's interesting, isn't it?

Over the years, I've done a lot of work for Jump at the Sun. One of my bigger projects with them has been a middle reader series called Willimena Rules! by Valerie Wilson Wesley. When the Sugar Plum books came along, the Jump at the Sun folks liked what I had done on the Willimena books and asked me to do some sample sketches of the main character Alexandrea (see above). Everyone approved the sketches (including Ms. Goldberg), and thus I was on the project. Pretty straightforward.

A little about the cover. The final cover, which can be seen in the previous post, started out a bit different. This sketch above was actually to be the spot on the back cover. It got moved to the front and the center girl (old version of the character Brenda) was replaced with Al.

From there is was just a matter of doing the final illustration in Photoshop using all my standard brushes, textures, etc.

sugar plum ballerinas #1

2008-10-20T07:47:00.003-06:00

Tomorrow (Oct 21) is the official release of the first of a series of books by Whoopi Goldberg, which happen to be illustrated by me. Plum Fantastic is a really cute book, Ms. Goldberg came up with some pretty fun quirky characters, and I had a great time doing the illustrations. It's one those chapter books with the occasional b/w interior illustration (about 18 I think). There will be six books total; I'm in the midst of the second one at the moment, so watch for them over the next year or so.

Whoopi will be plugging the book this week on tv. As far as I know (these things change), she'll be talking about it Tuesday Oct 21 on The View. And on Thursday Oct 23, she'll be on Good Morning America and Regis and Kelly.

Bens and Cans

2008-10-17T12:34:00.003-06:00

Chris, our Communications Director, graphic designer, all around makes things look good guy, just put the titles on my book covers, so thought I'd post them.

Months and months ago, I weaseled my way into writing some of the online books for our Imagine Learning paired readers activity. The way paired readers work is both relate to each other, in the sense the first prepares you with background knowledge for the second. Usually one is non-fiction and the other fiction. I was given the topics of community service and cause and effect. My first book idea was something more along the lines of that Connections show that used to be on PBS. Fantastic show. I traced the cause and effect from a plague-ridden flea 650 years ago to today's blockbuster pirate movie. Would have been fun to illustrate, unfortunately, it was way too complex for a 4th to 5th grade level book. So I started looking into the first volunteer fire company.

Once I started researching Ben Franklin's fire brigade, I found all sorts of things he did, so changed the topic to Ben's community building ideas. He created the first public library, first hospital, first fire brigade, reformed the postal service, and lots of other stuff. Good ol' Ben.

The second book - The Can Dance - is a little story about a girl who decides to have a can drive, and ultimately ends up on tv singing with her favorite pop star and her clever dancing pet duck (cause and effect!). When telling Chris about the plot, he said: "So, it's a Brady Bunch episode." And that pretty much sums it up.

it's the most wonderful time of the year...

2008-09-06T00:34:00.002-06:00

It's that time again where I spend a lot of time day dreaming about Halloween. This year is a little different - I'll be having a Dia de los Muertos party. I'll be periodically posting about the craft projects and party decorations in my other blog: The Two-Headed Goose.

sally ann thunder ann whirlwind crockett!

2008-08-19T15:11:00.004-06:00

Hey! It's Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind Crockett!

Back eons ago when I was in ye olde illustration school, we had an assignment to illustrate a scene from a tall tale. Somehow I stumbled across the story of Sally Ann, and illustrated her twirling her rattlesnake lasso. And no, I won't be digging that out to share. Earlier this year when we were coming up with ideas for the next batch of stories at Imagine Learning, I pitched the idea of Sally Ann. One of our writers Shar did a great job putting her own spin on the story, and I staked my claim on getting to illustrate it.

So here are a few scenes from the story. Young Sally Ann asks a panther to dance, and they become best friends. A bit older, she runs across this poor feller with his head stuck in the fork of a tree (who knows how he managed that). Turns out it's Davy Crockett! Once she saves him with her rattlesnake lasso, they get married and live happily ever after. Uh... apparently they didn't remember the Alamo.

Technical notes... done in Photoshop. I kept the characters on a separate layer from the background so I could blur out areas. Using the Gaussian Blur (in Filter > Blur...) was a great trick since I could reuse other backgrounds and copy/paste all over the place. I think it helped make the characters pop a bit more as well, so a nice added benefit of trying to save time.

I pretty much stuck with three brushes for these illos. I made a custom brush for drawing the lines. I started with a default preset spatter brush, then adjusted the spacing, size jitter and angle jitter (in the brushes palette) until I got a brush that draws a bit like a crayon. For the shading I used the non-customized spatter brushes, and then did all the touch-ups with my crayon-ish spatter brush.

I also tried making another custom brush using a round airbrush. I used that one to make all the leaves on the trees and background bushes. It didn't work exactly how I wanted, but it got the job done.

Once the illustrations were done, I put a layer of a sandstone-type texture over the top, and set it to soft light. Sweet as sugar!

the studio

2008-07-23T12:35:00.001-06:00

I haven't posted for a while, so I thought I would do something a little different. Instead of showing an illustration and describing how I work in Photoshop, I thought I'd describe how I work out there on the physical plane. Basically, here are some pictures of my studio, and I'll point out some of the tools I use.

First of all, most of the stuff in my studio is left over from Halloween. I never quite put it all away last year, and used some of my favorite things to decorate my studio. That sort of explains the framed eyeballs, skeleton arm stand and Vampire Emergency Kit.

Tools:

Mac G5 desktop computer.
Mine's a little old (it's hiding behind the monitor). It's pre-intel chips in macs, but it's a great computer. I've never had complaints about macs. The thing I really like in the latest OS is the Time Machine. I've got a 500gb external hard drive set up to do auto backups. It's pretty handy - cause you know when you haven't backed anything up for awhile, that's when your computer crashes, or you accidentally deleted that really important file.

At my inhouse job, I have a PC, and like it just fine. I'm not a big Apple snob, and Photoshop works the same on both. Macs just work for my brain (plus are so much prettier), so if I have to choose, I prefer working on a mac.

Samsung 305t 30" monitor.
I used to have two LCD apple display monitors. They were great, but eventually died after about 6 years. I was going to get the apple 30" cinema display to replace them, but when I started doing a little research, I found the Samsung beat Apple in just about everything - plus it was about $800 cheaper. Nice! It's a great monitor, super bright, excellent viewing angles, and if I bring a file from work to home, I can see lots more range of colors and values (like areas I thought were erased, but weren't.) Btw, I have two 20" Samsung SyncMaster 204t monitors at the dayjob. I'd say they're mid-range monitors.

Wacom Intuos 6x8" tablet.
Wacom tablets are the best thing ever. Because of this little thing, I basically no longer use paper. I can draw, sketch, paint, etc, as well, if not better than I could with traditional media. I like the 6x8 size. I don't like to move my hand or arm much when drawing, so it's the right size for me.

Just a side note about the Wacom Cintiq. Theoretically, and practically for some, this is the super coolest invention ever. I got one, and tried it, and ultimately hated it. I didn't mind the drawing on the screen part - that was a little weird at first, but not hard to get used to. I didn't like drawing like on a big drawing board, and felt like I was moving in slow motion to do anything since everything was so far away. I figured I could have gotten used to that as well eventually, but what I couldn't handle was the setup and logistics of the keyboard and extra monitor. Switching back and forth between monitors was a mess. I use the keyboard non-stop while painting, so programming the couple on-tablet buttons was not enough. The whole deal just made me cranky, and since I wasn't gaining anything I couldn't already do with the intuos, I packed up the cintiq and sent it back. On the other hand, one of my friends recently got one, and you'd think he'd died and gone to heaven, he loves it so much.

Epson 1280 Ink Jet Printer.
I don't print things often, but handy to have a printer that prints up to 13x19. It's been a great printer, and I just take it in to get cleaned every few years, and it's no worries.

Epson scanner.
I don't think I've used this since last year. I hardly ever draw on paper any more, so don't need to scan much. Nice to have one though, just in case. But as you can see, it has been relegated to the floor.

Lightbox.
Also relegated to the floor. It's that wood box leaning against the desk by the bookshelves (see below). I used to use it a lot, but good to still have just in case, so it's nice that it can be moved easily when I don't need it.

13" television.
Handy for watching/listening while working (need a break from iTunes now and then). Don't use it much, especially since I've been going through tv shows on DVD and hulu.com - but nice for late night talk shows.

Some tv show recs great for working (due to continued rewatchability): Ricky Gervais' Extras, The Office, The Flight of the Conchords, and Arrested Development.

iPhone.
Little white thing in front of the tv is my iPhone dock. I can see why some people prefer other phones, or Blackberries or whatever, but I love, LOVE my iPhone. When I got it I finally got rid of my land phone line, since I was forwarding those calls to my cel anyway. It leaves me without a line for a fax machine, but I hardly ever used that either, so instead I scan and email any documents I would have faxed in the past.

Everything else is your standard office stuff. The bookshelves are full of illustration-related and children's books. I've two more bookshelves out in the front of the house where all my non-fiction/reference type books live. Luckily, finding reference online has curbed my book buying quite a bit.

And that's about it. Questions? Anyone? Bueller?

imagine island :: world premiere

2008-06-01T19:47:00.005-06:00

Last Friday was the World Premiere of the Imagine Island TV show. We had a big party up at the BYU to screen one of the episodes. The show was produced in partnership with KBYU and will be broadcast all over Latin America. It uses a lot of content from the Imagine Learning English software, bridged by a story with a live action actor filmed on green screen - sort of a Blues Clues model.

I've been the go-to artist whenever the video guys need some new art for the show. One of the first things I had to do was make a portrait of Jack (the explorer dude) and Booster (the robot) in a cubist sort of style. Pretty fun to do. Also, you can see what the clown car was for that I posted a few weeks back. And finally, I posted that last screenshot of the dollhouse cause all that dollhouse furniture is mine from when I was a kid. It is actually bearhouse furniture since bears lived in my house... anyway. See! It does pay to be a packrat.

magician's duel

2008-05-29T14:46:00.003-06:00

Here's a little test screen for one of my current projects. This is going to be an animation about plurals, as demonstrated by a magician's duel.

The background was painted in Photoshop. I thought I'd try the whole rendered background vs. flat characters look.

The characters are built in Flash. You can't tell in this screenshot, but the characters are made of lots of separated out pieces: legs, hands, feet, heads, faces, etc. Then I can go and animate them sort of like puppets. I'm not much of an animator, so trying to animate a magical duel is going to be a bit of a challenge. Should be fun though.

level two poster - tutorial

2008-05-19T16:39:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, our Marketing/Sales folks asked us to make some big posters for our products - super exciting! I was assigned the Level Two poster, since I had originally designed the characters. I finally finished it last week - it was a huge painting: 24x36 inches and of course, I opted to stuff everything I could into it.

This isn't an overly comprehensive tutorial, but will walk through some of the steps.

First step: Thumbnails
I did these as actual size, but 72 dpi, and as you can see, I didn't really go into too much detail at this point. The idea was to figure out the poster content. You can see two layers. The first layer was the initial scribbling that then had the opacity dropped down. The second layer is a darker little bit tighter sketch. I did four versions, and between myself and the other artists, we all liked the one that was going to be the most work - of course!

Step Two: The Comp
There was actually a version between the thumbnail and the comp below, but apparently I didn't save a copy of it. After picking the third thumbnail, I pasted in some of the reference artwork from the product, and did sketches of everything else to start working out how it was all going to fit together. That was the version I showed to the Sales folks for approval, so they didn't have to do too much guesswork.

From there I did a fairly tight sketch (for me anyway) at full size and final dpi. Each character or thing was drawn on a separate layer, with another layer of rough color beneath the lines layers. This made it easy to slide things around and refine the composition.

A little later I decided it would help contain the busy-ness to have a little border on the sides. While I was in the middle of rendering all the pieces, our graphics guy decided to have a blue band with company info and logo as a common feature of all the posters (you can see my temp version of the bar in the final above.)

Step Three: Finish
Once the comp version was all worked out, I started to work on each character/thing individually. For this tutorial, I'll show the progression of one of the main characters: Alex.

This is the Alex sketch from the comp - just with everything else turned off. She has two layers at this point - the line drawing and the color fills. I went in on the line layer and cleaned up the line a little - shaved it down with the eraser tool, etc. Then I went in and cleaned up the color layer a little bit. I'm using the simple round brushes and soft round brushes to do this.

Cleaning up the sketch rather than redrawing on a new layer isn't necessarily faster, but I'm a bit crap at drawing nice lines without having to clean them up. So why bother with an extra tracing step? And it also helps keep the drawing fresh.

So now I use the magic wand tool and select the areas of color on the color layer. I always start with skin since the face is the most important part. I use the soft round brushes to do some shading. This isn't meant to be final shading - think of it as an underpainting.

All the major areas are roughly shaded, so it's time to color the lines. Since I drew them originally on a transparent layer, all I need to do is turn on the Preserve Transparency button, and I can color the lines a few shades darker than the filled-in areas. Sometimes I make the exact color of the line using the color sliders on the color palette and then color at 100% opacity. Other times I select the darkest color of shading, set my brush to 50% opacity, and then paint on the black line. All turns out the same either way.

After the lines are colored, I merge the two layers together. I go in with either soft or hard round brushes, and continue cleaning up the lines and the shading. This part of the process is kind of hard to describe, and probably if I can ever figure out how, should be shown as a video. I'm constantly changing brush size and opacity and using CTRL to toggle to the eyedropper tool to select colors. Above you can see the head and hair are pretty much cleaned up.

Here's Alex all done. I went through the same process on all the other layers of stuff. Once everything was done, I went through each layer and used Blending Options in the Layers Palette to add a drop shadow. Once I have the shadow working on one layer, I can right click on that layer and select Copy Layer Style. Then I right click on all the other layers and choose Paste Layer Style.

From there I did a little fancy cutting and pasting of the blue starfield to cover up some areas. The finishing touch was a layer of a rock texture set to soft light over the whole thing. I then sent it off to our graphics guy to add the blue bar and corporate logo and all that business. Took a fair amount of time to do, but I really enjoyed working on it.

may miscellany

2008-05-05T17:15:00.005-06:00

Here are a bunch of random things I've done lately. I've been doing a lot of little illustrations for our video guys for a big project they are working on. It's been really fun - my favorite project for them was a pirate map style board game they needed for a physical prop.

Interesting bit of continuity. My first real job was working at an educational software company called Waterford Institute. My first project there was an animation of an iguana in an igloo. 14 years later... still drawing iguanas and igloos.

Currently I'm working on a huge poster for Imagine Learning Level Two - I'll have a little tutorial for that once it's done. Also loaded up with freelance as usual. Busy busy.

my Friend ricky

2008-04-02T22:27:00.007-06:00

I've been hearing that the April issue of The Friend is out there, so here are the illustrations I did for it (way back in January). The Art Director there is fantastic to work with, and let me decide which style to illustrate the article. The top illustration is part of a full spread - the white edge between the boys is actually the gutter. The second illustration was a spot for the third page of a three page story.

There's not too much to describe in the step-by-step. The art director gave me pretty tight comps as a base for my sketches, and everything went smoothly from there.

I imported the sketch (done in Photoshop) into Flash. I used the pencil tool to trace, and then filled in all the shapes. Then I went and deleted all the outlines.

This is what it looked like when I was done in Flash. Not every color is a different layer, but there were a lot. When I exported layers, I grouped together areas where I wanted there to be a drop shadow. (In Flash, go to File>Export>Export Image... and then select .png as the image format so you keep the transparency.)

I then imported all those separate layers into Photoshop and combined them into one big ol' file. The spread had 26 layers, and 10 for the little page 3 spots. Once in photoshop I adjusted all the colors, added a Drop Shadow in the Blending options. I added a little extra detail here and there like tree leaves, asphalt stones, blush on the faces, but really there wasn't much. I added a Guassian blur to some of the tree layers to push them back into the distance a little, and then finally on top layer I had a photo of a stone texture that I set to Soft Light.

spring?

2008-03-07T16:59:00.005-07:00

Here's a happy butterfly in honor of spring - or at least getting faked out that it *might* be spring. Good ol' Utah. Don't really have anything new to post. It seems most everything I've been working on lately has either been something I can't post, or isn't really worth posting. Maybe I'll have something interesting to post next week.

One small bit of fun from Imagine Learning - I did finally get a two-headed goose into the product. It is an icon meant to represent something "unusual." Hooray for the two-headed goose.

Photoshop Tutorial - Missing Manny

2008-02-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

Finally - I've finished a new tutorial. Go HERE to check it out.

brown feller

2008-01-17T07:42:00.001-07:00

blackbeard

2008-01-16T09:07:00.001-07:00

red femme fatale

2008-01-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

lil yellow sunshine

2008-01-14T07:49:00.001-07:00

purple zombie girl

2008-01-12T08:30:00.001-07:00

green goggles

2008-01-11T08:55:00.001-07:00

blue fairy and orange kid

2008-01-10T09:01:00.001-07:00

pink drawing

2008-01-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

And here's another little rough warm-up drawing. It's kinda fun coloring these loose sketches without having to worry about them being all nice and clean.

green drawings

2008-01-07T13:15:00.001-07:00

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2008 is a fabulous year for us all.

I've been working on a tutorial of one of the pictures from the missing manny book, but it's kind of epic, and i'm kind of epically busy this month, so it's slowly getting put together. So above is an attempt to post at least *something* before we get too far along into the new year.

These are some quick sketches and random doodles from this morning as I was trying to get into the work groove. Tutorial coming soon... hopefully in the next week or so.

missing manny

2007-12-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Hey - happy December everyone!

Here are a few pages from my latest little book at Imagine Learning. It's a pretty fun little story about a missing person mystery on the set of a pirate movie (haven't gotten to any of the pirate stuff yet.) This is just your basic draw and color it all in photoshop style. Also, my detective is a not so subtle homage to Emerson Cod of Pushing Daisies. If you've never seen it, hop on over to abc.com and watch a few episodes. Love, love, love this show..

Don't Fence Me In

2007-11-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

Here are some more illos from my little immigration book. It was a fun book to do since I like working in this style. The downside is that I had to do them so fast, there's really no time for careful planning and had to just sort of wing it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't work quite so well. I did kind of go nuts with the gaussian blur with this book, but it saved time since if it was gonna be blurry anyway, didn't have to spend too much time on it.

On the Illustration: Friday front, guess I didn't even make it the first week of my new resolve. I blame the Holiday. I had a really cool superstition to use too... oh well. I will try to get one done next week.

Illustration Friday: Scale

2007-11-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted to IF forever, so I think that will be a new goal to try to do something quick every week. We'll see if I actually do it... And since it's a little too late this week to start, I have two scale pictures from a book about gravity that I worked on this past summer.

The Mighty Mayflower

2007-11-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted anything from Imagine Learning for a while. This illustration of the Mayflower is from a little book I've been working on called Don't Fence Me In. I seem to be getting the immigration-themed books lately, since my other book I just finished is about the Statue of Liberty (mostly photos, so no illos to post).

This was done primarily in Flash. The ship was exported in about 7 layers, plus two layers of ocean. The .pngs are all imported into Photoshop, where I add a Drop Shadow to each layer. The back layer of ocean got the gaussian blur filter treatment. There is a texture layer over the top, I think it's a photo of a rock, set to Soft Light. I airbrushed a little on the sails, the sky, and around the outside edges, and that was basically it.

Gallery of Terror

2007-10-31T11:21:00.000-06:00

Happy Halloween!

Years ago I worked at a place called Waterford Institute. While I was there, a tradition known as The Gallery of Terror was started. Even though very few of us still work there, the tradition has continued.

This year I did two pieces for two Galleries of Terror. The first, the giraffe (or, as I have decided to name him: Pongo Zarafa) was done to hang in my house for my annual Halloween Extravaganza. It is a copy of a painting that hung on the wall of the set of the tv version of the Addams Family. Also posted for Jeff Davis'Official Gallery of Terror.

The second picture: The Maryn, was painted for our Gallery of Terror at Imagine Learning. Kind of a long story to explain where this comes from, so I won't bother. :-)

Have a fabulously kooky, ooky and spooky Halloween!

major award

2007-10-24T00:14:00.000-06:00

I recently got an email informing me Colorful Sleepy Sheep won a Moonbeam Children's Book Award bronze medal in the board book category. Cool - I didn't know it had even been entered. Congrats to author Rory Zuckerman! I actually worked on this book about 4 years ago, but it has a new publisher now, and I guess will be released soon. It was a great project to work on. Hopefully these sell well and we simply have to do another set!

Here is one of the interiors - which is seasonally appropriate. I kinda got carried away with the sheep puns for their costumes. Can you figure them all out?

juggling

2007-10-21T22:57:00.001-06:00

Another illustration for Creating Keepsakes. I think this was in the August or September issue, so safe to post.

Also, my portfolio has been updated on the Shannon Associates site. Not much that hasn't already been posted here at some point, but nice to finally have some more recent work posted there. Next step, updating my own website. Oy.

zero

2007-09-24T16:42:00.001-06:00

I'm not sure who this dude is, or why he has such freaky big eyes, but there ya go.

This is just a little playing around in photoshop in-between working on real illustrations.

fancy hair

2007-09-12T10:19:00.000-06:00

I'm pretty bad at keeping a sketchbook. I'm thinking that's something I need to work on... but in the meantime... Sometimes when I'm working on sketches for a project, I'll get stumped or want a little break, or whatever, and so I'll add a blank layer in my Photoshop file, and draw some random little sketches. I usually delete them, so don't really have any to show.

Above are a few random little sketches that were scattered through the sketches for a book I'm currently working on. I liked the drawing of the fancy hair lady, and decided to color it last night since I had a little spare time. It's always interesting to see what gets lost in the transition from sketch to final.

Gravity

2007-07-31T09:47:00.000-06:00

latest project - a book about gravity.

Lately I've been using a new brush for whenever I have to do some linework in photoshop. I am really bad at making nice lines with the round brushes. It takes me forever because I have to go in and smooth out and clean up my really shaky linework. So I made a brush from one of the Spatter brushes (one of the default brushes). I selected the 14 pixel spatter brush, kept the spacing really low, and then adjusted the rotation and stuff (see brush palette screenshot.) This has been a great brush for me. I can draw with it more how I used to draw with a pencil to do my "inking." Plus, I like that the line has a little more softness or texture to it.