little wonder company

 

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

 

 

 

  

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

it's a jelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scholastic lucky books

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

UVSC (uvu) Forum on Children's Literature

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.