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At this summer's SCBWI National conference in LA, several of us had the opportunity to shoot video to be posted in the new SCBWI Speaker's Bureau. Mine just went live! Have a looksie... (hubbie says I'm a goof). Click here to learn more about my speaking engagements! :)

1. Failing to modernizemount Olympus failing to computerize. And this weekend is the last chance to see our ongoing show! We'll be there waiting for you.

Trailer for Art Out Loud, Vol 3 from Kate Feirtag on Vimeo.

This is an absolute mess--my washes got away from me & I will be redoing this. As a child, my "Wild Thing" was anything under the bed and especially the monster in the closet. If I piled all of my stuffed animals on the bed, I was much safer!

If you've been around long enough to have seen the Liberty Bell when it was on tour, you probably are familiar with the comic strip Henry. Henry is the other little bald-headed boy, who for decades never uttered a word. The strip was created by Carl Anderson and became popular world-wide due to using the universal language of pictures.An interesting note about Anderson, which might or might not

So you thought you used to play 2D games. If you had taken a look behind the screen, then you'd have seen this. The featured game is Dig Dug from Namco, a classic 8-bit video game for the arcades, released in 1982.

Like many other Sevensheaven images this image is available as a high-quality art print. Visit the Sevensheaven shop portal for more info.

After I posted DR yesterday, there were requests for his best friend to join him here - apparently you can't have one without the other.


There is one small regret I have with this sketch, and it has to do with when the doughnut idea happened - notably after I had sketched the signature smiley badge! The smiley always appears on that side of Quinch and so he would need to be seen from the other side from the jam-drip joke to work - ah well, if I decide to do a pic of DR& Quinch again, you know I'll make sure that I work it out so this idea works properly... BUT, that is what sketches are for, innit? - working things out!

Spectrum 16, the annual collection of fantastic art, is now in bookstores.

The 264 page volume contains the work of over 300 painters and sculptors, and represents the best in the field of imaginative book and magazine illustration, concept art, advertising, comics, and sculpture.


Above, the Silver Medal winner in the book category, J.B. Monge.

This years Grand Master Award went to Richard Corben. The book also features editor Arnie Fenner's perceptive essay putting the artwork in it contemporary historical context, as well as a list of artist contacts at the back of the book.

Find it at Bud's Art Books, Amazon, or your local brick-and-mortar.
Spectrum website, link.

I have uploaded quite few art books on an Ebay store. Some are pictured below. They have started to sell already but I thought I would let my art blog friends know as these books are cheap and in excellent or new condition. You can find them here. Pleasant Surprises Store I will be uploading dozens of craft books as well in the near future and art supplies. Additionally I will be auctioning a

Author Rukhsana Khan has talked in the past, though perhaps not in as much detail, about incidents of bullying and racist abuse towards her and her family, following their immigration to Canada from Pakistan. As Anti-Bullying Week in the UK draws to a close, and in the hope that by bringing such instances into the open they may never be repeated, we welcome Rukhsana’s guest post today.

By Rukhsana Khan:

When we first came to Canada from Pakistan in 1965, not only were we children bullied at school but my father, a tool and die maker, was bullied at work. Some of his fellow workers wouldn’t call him by name, they’d call him ‘black bastard’, and he put up with it because he had a wife and four children to feed. When we first arrived, he was making about $7 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much now but back then it was good money. However, within a year of buying our house in Dundas, Ontario, and my little sister and brother being born, he got laid off. He ended up accepting another job for $2.35 an hour. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had about five dollars a week with which to buy food; most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

We were the only Pakistani Muslim family in Dundas. The other kids in my class didn’t know much about brown people. When I was in elementary school the other children would tell me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty. They said that if we went home and took a lot of baths we’d get white like them. So we tried it. We took five baths a day for about two weeks. When that didn’t work, we tried baby powder and finally, we stopped drinking chocolate milk for a while.

When I got to middle school things got so much worse. Suddenly it really mattered what clothes you wore, and back then it had to be jeans. I didn’t even ask my parents to buy them for me; I knew they couldn’t afford them. Instead I asked for some men’s polyester work pants I saw in the Sears catalogue. I figured they looked like jeans, they just didn’t cost that much. This attempt at trying to fit in was worse than if I hadn’t bothered but I didn’t know it at the time. Also, at school I often spoke out – a big mistake. I was always lucky to have some very supportive teachers, and stupidly I took to heart their encouragement to share my opinions and did so freely. I had very poor social skills. I read tons of books and in the books the kids who were outsiders and very different were eventually seen to possess extraordinary qualities and were valued – kind of like Cinderella. I don’t know what I was thinking, offering opinions and sticking my neck out when everyone else in the class tested the waters to make sure their words jived with the consensus before committing themselves to an opinion. That, coupled with the awkward way I dressed and my skin colour, really set me apart and made me a target for bullies.

Two of the most notorious of my bullies in grade seven and eight were the most popular boys in the school named John and Rick. John was very handsome. Rick was ugly but he had a very nice body so he was popular too. They formed the hub of the ‘in’ crowd. I desperately wanted to be friends with them. I thought I belonged with them. They were smart, witty and cool, and I thought they’d like me once they got to know me. There were other k

It’s the time again when critics start compiling their “best of” lists for the decade. We’ll probably do a few ourselves, though the roundup of American TV animation is looking fairly barren from this vantage point. How many shows debuted in the past decade that were entertaining, made a lasting impact on their audience, and have a shot at being remembered by future generations? A handful of American shows come to mind as standouts, most of which were cult favorites rather than mainstream successes—Invader Zim, Superjail, Venture Bros., Samurai Jack, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Yo Gabba Gabba. (A comprehensive list of TV shows can be found on Wikipedia.)

Compare this to the 1990s when we saw the debuts of TV shows that were cultural phenomenons like The Simpsons, The Ren and Stimpy Show, South Park, Beavis and Butt-Head, Batman: The Animated Series, Dexter’s Lab, Rugrats, The Powerpuff Girls, Spongebob Squarepants and yes, even Family Guy. It seemed like we were on the cusp of a new era of “creator-driven” shows that were free from the meddling impulses of network execs. It’s little surprise that these shows are the ones that audiences still discuss nowadays.

If the 2000s served any purpose, it was to highlight how unique the previous decade was; the Nineties were a genuine silver age of TV animation in which artists were allowed the freedom to experiment and the elbow room to fulfill their creative visions. The unfortunate byproduct of Nineties animation success was the introduction of a new breed of development and creative execs whose ignorance about animation art and process is matched only by their fearfulness of creativity and originality. These boobs spent the entire decade trying to come up with the next Spongebob, the next Simpsons, and the next Family Guy without the slightest inkling of how to foster the kind of environment that allowed those shows to exist in the first place. The dubious 2000s is their legacy, and it signals a depressing downward shift for TV animation in America.

I’m curious to hear your opinions. What’s your take on the last decade and what are your picks for the best new animated series of the past ten years?