I sent out new postcards this week. Here's the back...

1956 is a little before my time but I do remember those purple mimeographed worksheets.

I learned this exercise from a terrific workshop lead by the insanely talented Kelly Light at NE SCBWI. Not only did Kelly run a great workshop - she also baked everyone chocolate chip cookies. You gotta love this girl!

For this exercise, make a grid and draw a random shape in each box, then see if you can make characters out of each one. I thought it would be fun if two people did this together and they swapped shapes. Or if a group of people all started with the same shapes and see what different characters emerge from the same shapes. If anyone wants to do it, here's another page of shapes to start with. I'll post mine tomorrow. If anyone else wants a go at it, I can post yours too.

Millie is definitely NOT in a hurry.

Just getting chance to unpack my bags from the New England SCBWI conference this past weekend. What a great conference. The organizers did an amazing job (as usual) If you are interested in writing or illustrating for children's books and you live in New England you should really get your keister to this conference next year. Lots of good resources and lots of good inspiration. I went to a fantastic character design session with the amazingly talented Kelly Light on Saturday. I walked away with some great ideas as well as some awesome chocolate chip cookies (I hope she'll give me her recipe!) And I spent Sunday at an illustration intensive with Dan Yaccarino - how cool is that?!

Plus it's so great to see all my amazingly talented illustrator friends like Hazel Mitchell (roomie extraordinaire!), Russ Cox (winner of the poster contest times 3!), Teri Weidner, Carlyn Beccia, and Brian Lies just to name a few. And I also got to meet some new friends like Greg Matusic (somebody seriously needs to get this guy a banjo), AP Sabourin, and Misa Saburi. These are just a handful of the wonderful folks I met. There must be something in the water around here to have so much talent.

Today I'm putting all the postcards and business cards I collected over the weekend into my scrap book. It's good inspiration to look through them plus it helps me remember where I met people. Of course nothing beats the souvenir that Casey Girard came home with. I'm SO jealous that I didn't think of having everyone draw in my sketchbook.

Received some greeting card samples from Great Arrow Graphics (greatarrow.com) today. I love the velvety finish the hand silk screening gives the cards. I believe all of these cards should be available this Halloween and Christmas. I was especially pleased with how the fox in the woods turned out.

If you are interested in automata like I am, you might enjoy this link to the automaton featurette that comes on the Hugo DVD/Blueray edition. I think I need to get BlueRay player just so I can watch all the extra content that they pack onto the BlueRay editions of movies. Thanks to the Automata/Automaton Blog for the link.

I'm going to the New England SCBWI conference this weekend and trying to finish up my homework for the Advanced Illustrator Academy. Gee, it's been a while since I've had to do homework, I'm finding it a little stressful. Part of the assignment was to design characters and create a finished piece of art for a story that was provided. Here's a peek at my final art.

One of my favorite parts of picture book work is designing the characters. It's fun to see who shows up for the casting call so to speak. I've grown kind of attached to this little bear character, I think he might have to come live in another stories at some point.

I got a nice surprise in the mail the other day, an advanced copy of Carlyn Beccia's new book, "Digital Painting for the Complete Beginner." It officially goes on sale next week.

Carlyn has provided lots of information for someone just starting out and wanting to learn how to "paint" using Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop. She has also packed in lots of good tips and techniques that more experienced users will find useful. Carlyn is a wizard with Corel Painter. And I contributed a couple of Photoshop tutorials as well. Including this one on how to add age and color to a line drawing.



I can't wait to dive in and learn some new tricks. Hopefully with the help of this book I might finally be able to figure out Corel Painter myself.

Pros: 1. Unlimited battery life 2. It never replaces a word I type with something grossly inappropriate 3. I never have to drive 20 miles to an Apple store so someone can teach me how to use it 4. It's a great hand/wrist workout (carpal tunnel wasn't an issue back in the day) and 5. Although it doesn't come with a warranty it's still working after 83 years, so I figure there is an extremely good chance it will outlast the measly one year warranty on most of my electronic gadgets.

Cons: Slowest internet connection EVER!!

Here's another promotional piece that I did recently. I thought it would be fun to try and create class photos from different time periods. I think most days I feel like the kid in the bottom row with the striped shirt.

Next, I think I'm going for the 1970's. That might have to be a standing group photo so I can get the bell bottoms in.

April showers bring May flowers. That was the inspiration for this year's Illustration for Kid's Spring promotional mailer. So naturally the first thing that came to mind was a sad little rat holding an umbrella made out of a guacamole container. Of course.

Here's the first layout I did for this image which I really think conveys the feeling of him being sad and along but I didn't want to loose all the details in such a wide angle shot.

Here's a concept painting from Pixar's Up (Done in gouache by Lou Romano and Don Shank) Below is my 15 minute copy done in Photoshop. I struggle with color so for me this was a very useful exercise. I hope to do more of these.

I have a thing for puppets and these guys are just too cute. This little piggy and cow were needle felted by Laura Lee Burch. Makes me want to try needle felting again but alas I'll just end up stabbing my fingers.

There is a new Steve and Wessley comic available. The last page was uploaded today.

Alfie the Alligator now has his own blog. It will make it easier for me to add new coloring pages and other fun things for kids. So please visit the site and print out your own dancing alligator puppet. Or better yet print a whole bunch and have them dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

It's a new year, time to spruce up the ol' website .

I've been feeling a little blah about my work lately and thought maybe trying something new was in order. So for Christmas this year I made little comic books to give out instead of Xmas cards. I've never really done much with comics, but this was a lot of fun. I've already got ideas for other Steve and Wessley comics.

You can see the whole comic here.

Wow, it's true Wegmans is truly a grocery store that has everything. They even have Caldecott winner Chris VanAllsburg, at least for one day anyway. Chris VanAllsburg will be doing a book signing at the Wegmans in Northborough Mass on December 10th from 1:00-3:00. Details can be found at www.wegmans.com

I'm still on an Adobe Flash kick and for the past couple of weeks I've been knee deep in ActionScript. Well, maybe more like neck deep. But after lots of Lynda training and lots more reading on top of that, I feel like I'm FINALLY getting the gist of it. My animation skills are still pretty rough, but I've been having lots of fun programming the ActionScript. Here are two games that a I created so far...

Here's the first one I did. It's a cookie game (of course Alfie the Alligator would need a cookie game)

And here's a train multiplication game I created for my train obsessed son to help him learn his multiplication tables.

If you try either game and find a bug, of if you have any comments or suggestions, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know.

I needed an image to use as a demo when I talk about creating under paintings at the NESCBWI Illustrator Day this Saturday. So I started doodling and came up with this character. Can you tell I didn't bother looking up any reference for the clothes? Even so, he kind of reminds me of Bob Cratchit.

Here's what the under painting looks like...

I confess, I'm guilty of watching my Amazon sales rankings. Okay lately I've been sneaking a peak every morning because for some reason "May I Please Have a Cookie?" has been doing crazy well (under 1,000). Sales rankings are one of those things I never paid attention to before I had a book in print. But I think everyone who is published has been mildly obsessed with checking sales rankings at one time or another. And of course I also check and see if there there are any new customer reviews. If you write a customer review on Amazon, I don't know if anyone other customers will read it, but I bet you the author of the book will.

I found a funny post by Bex Huff where he checks everyday to see what books are more and less popular than his. It sort of puts ones work in perspective.

So I thought it would be fun to see how my book fit into the the scheme of things. Since my book is written for preschoolers, I thought it would only be fair to compare it to other picture books. So today, Noverber 15, 2001, "May I Please Have a Cookie?" is less popular than "If you give a Dog a Donut" But more popular than "Rah Rah Radishes." Which just goes to show, everything is better deep fried.

I hope you will join us on November 19th in Manchester, New Hampshire for Illustrator Day. This is a program sponsored by the New England chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) The very talented Carlyn Beccia and myself will be doing an encore presentation of our Digital Painting Duels program that was first given at the 2011 annual conference. Here's a class description.

Digital Painting Duels

Are you new to digital painting and wondering what program to use? Or maybe you are an experienced user and would like to learn more than one program? Welcome to the Digital Painting Duels where artists Jennifer Morris and Carlyn Beccia spare off to demo Adobe Photoshop vs. Corel Painter in the bloodiest. knock-out, digital brawl of the century. See some of the hottest digital painting tricks including; secret brush techniques to mimic traditional media, creating rich textures and patterns, and ways to fix compositional problems. Learn which program to use in your art and place your bets on who will be left standing.

It's much more amiable than the description implies. Let's face it, we all know Photoshop is the most amazing product on the face of the Earth (wink). But we did cover lots of nifty tricks and tips that will help you with your digital artwork. If you missed our presentation in the spring, I hope you'll be able to join us on the 19th in Manchester.