Hey, diddle, diddle......

It seems that summer provides a chance for me to move on 

with some digital painting.  

Continuing the series on the nursery rhyme, "Hey, diddle, diddle",

here's a progression from "the cat and the fiddle",

an, as yet, unfinished digital illustration.

Young Authors Visit

Last week, I was invited by Mrs. Peggy McBee, 

to address the winners of the Young Authors Competition 

from Morningside Elementary School.

What an incredibly talented group of students! 

It was my pleasure to demonstrate some drawing 

and hidden picture tips for them to use on their next project. 

As a bonus, I got this lovely hydrangea!

Thank you, Mrs. McBee and Principal Mrs. Cortina Bell-Gray

and all the winners!

PBAA Flip-book Character

This recent digital painting is my character 

for the Picture Book Artists Association Flip-book. All the artists are submitting a character 

for this promotional work which will be an imaginative piece. 

I can hardly wait to see them all together!

Highlights Comics from the Illustrators' Party

    

This year's Illustrators' Party at Highlights was the weekend of September 28-30. Pre-party the illustrators were asked to fill out a Sketchbook page which would be complied into a bound book. The results are amazing with some very clever ideas from some very talented illustrators.

Thanks to Kelley Cunningham for including me in this book and for sending it to me since I was unable to attend the party this year.

Here's to next year!

Digital Progression help from Folio Academy

Here is the same piece from the last post with an added a background. 

I did it all on the computer without my usual scanned sketch. 

These experiments in digital illustration all started from two of 

Will Terry's tutorials on the Folio Academy, 

a source that I highly recommend. 

There are lots of other tutorials on the site and they are all very reasonably priced. 

Check it out!

Meanwhile, I have more to learn....

More digital experimenting

I've been experimenting with digital painting without outlines. It's a lot like painting, wonderful to see the shapes of things and how they relate to one another. The corrections were easy to make and I had a lot of corrections!

This is the original from my sketchbook. The technique was a deviation from my usual habit of starting with a tight line drawing. Digital painting was way more fun!

Update on "...and the dish ran away with the spoon"

Last year I posted some preliminary work on this piece and happily moved on to other projects. When I got a chance to work on it again, the cd file was missing from my studio! Gremlins?!... or did I clean up the studio so well that I trashed it? Yes, .... trashed it from the computer. Oh well, it was a chance to look at it again, and make better decisions on the color.

Here it is, still in progress, but mostly worked out. It has been fun to have the time to work on the color.

And here are the preliminary color sketches.