My friend, Jean, loves bats. We have been calling each other BLOB since high school. Hopefully this all makes sense now... ;)
Best wishes to you for a happy holiday season and a most excellent new year xoxo

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(early Nina art)

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This little painting of Chicken Lily is going to be a part of the silent auction to raise funds for the Plum Creek Children's Literacy Festival so that more than 13,000+ students can attend the festival free-of-charge. The auction opens on September 1st. Many thanks to Dylan Teut for all that he does to connect kids with books!

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Working on something new for Halloween, this is a bit from the sketch I just started. I love the weirdness of how ideas happen and look forward to seeing how the final piece will turn out.

I also posted this sketch at The Sketchables today. Happy sketching!

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Hello! My kids have officialy been in school for 5 days now. I miss having them at home during the day, but they are enjoying school so far so that is pretty great. Ticking things off my to-do list is a good feeling: our new storm door has been installed and new window boxes are up (the house colors turned out great, btw!), the dogs have been to the vet, and I even scheduled a furnace tune-up. I have some book dummies out on submission right now so that is exciting, working on a new picture book manuscript that will eventually turn into a dummy, and revisiting a painting I started a while ago. Getting all of my duck, duck, gray ducks in a row is a very nice feeling.

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Hello! Haven't posted in a while, summer vacation is keeping us busy over here. We have picked out new colors to paint our house,

watched some monarch caterpillars turn into butterflies,
picked a lot of raspberries,

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I was thrilled to receive the proofs for Chicken Lily this week. It's going to be a real book! The official publication date is 29 March 2016. Absolutely thrilled with how it turned out, I can't wait for you to meet Lily and all of her pals! Here is the official cover:

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Hello! The past couple months have been a little busy.
I finished all of the interior art for Chicken Lily late November. I love how it turned out!

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Pretty sure that all I can show from what I am working on right now are the little color blobs in the bottom right corners of all of my illustrations. While I am busy working away, feel free to participate in the Pole Poll (top left). It will be interesting to see which pole(s) prevail in the polls.
To complicate things further, I considered having a Poll Poll to see if people favor polls that are:
(a) inquiries into opinions
(b) the counting of votes/ballots
(3) the top of one's head
(d) pertaining to tame parrots.
That seemed a bit nonsensical to me, so you can just think on it and keep your answer to yourself.

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Aaron Zens and the Z-Kids are celebrating 8 years of fabulousness at the their awesome blog, Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty. Artists are invited to re-imagine art by the kids and submit their creations. I am happy to share the beautiful piece that Elijah created and then the art that he inspired me to make. SO MUCH FUN! Thank you for filling the world with your creativity, Zenz Family!

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The other day I stopped dead in my tracks and watched in disbelief as this small villain tried to get into my home by scaling the screen door, climbing up so high that we were almost at eye-to-eye with nothing but flimsy mesh between us.

Is this the very same criminal who has been trying to hide some sort of evidence in the flowerpot by our front door? I saw the pile of dirt on the stoop and the hole in the dirt by the geranium firsthand.
When I venture out through the front door, chipmunks chirp and scurry away as fast as they can. What are they so afraid of?

I have heard the thundering of tiny feet on my rooftop, watched the bandit try to cram huge walnuts into the roof vents over and over again. The big green walnuts roll down from the roof and crash down on our deck with every failed attempt. If the walnuts are so special, why are they abandoned so easily?  I throw the black walnuts over the fence as far as I can, but I have an old Nerf Vortex injury, so none of the throws are very great ones, to be honest.

Is this all some plot to grow black walnut trees? I have heard that the lumber is quite valuable (according to The Profitable Plants Digest), but then why try to plant one in the roof vent of my house? Trees take years to grow, clearly there is a certain level of premeditation going on here. While the squirrels are trying to plant the trees on our rooftop, they surely must realize that the ground would be much better; but then they'd be on the chipmunks' turf...

I shudder to think that there is a connection between this suspicious activity and the untimely death of an unfortunate chipmunk in the vent of our clothes dryer this summer, just 10 feet away from the aforementioned flowerpot.

Is it coincidental, or did the chipmunk know too much?

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I am thrilled to share that I will soon begin illustrating an adorable picture book entitled Chicken Lily! It will be published by Henry Holt in Spring of 2016. I am over the moon, of course! Many thanks to my brilliant agent, Teresa Kietlinski, and to all my friends and family for all of their support. Time to draw some chickens!  xoxo Nina

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