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Just spent a wonderful week in Colorado with my daughter. I had an art tent at the Evergreen Summer Arts Fest--wonderful weather, very nice people, and amazing landscape. While watching the crowd go by the tent, I worked on some small cards (ink pen and watercolor). I discovered that the ink pen that I was using bled, but I kinda liked the effect with the watercolor, so I just kept going, very carefully.

This is one of the pieces, and the banner above (titled Howling Sun) is another. With August just around the corner, I was thinking about the idiom "the dog days of summer." August is one of our hottest months in Louisiana. I'm really going to miss the cool mornings and nights of Colorado!

What's everyone else working on?

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Thanks Anne-Marie for a most amazing and beautiful banner! Love this so much! Thanks all of you who've contributed to the banner--we've had some outstanding illustrating!
Don't forget to check out our new blog: http://watercolor-wednesdays.com

thanks,
Linda

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This is Teddy, my daughter's poodle mix, a little guy with a big heart & a great personality. He's a character all by himself. We always laugh at his funny expression which changes from a smile to a weird but hilarious straight line. I love this little guy!

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I’ve been experimenting with my digital style to make it more painterly and yet retain the flat color that I like so much. This first piece of new art is an example of that experiment and works for the CBIG blog prompt this month (outside) and the Illustration Friday prompt for this week (atmosphere). Instead of raining cats and dogs, it’s raining on the cats and dogs!

The other new piece of art I have is a drawing of a lantern fish that I did for Ripple. It sold before I could post it here, but I still wanted to share the drawing because it works for the WaWe oceans prompt. Plus, it cracks me up. Hope it gives you a laugh too!

The third piece of new art you may have noticed already. I have a new avatar because my hair is all chopped off. It will grow back (eventually) right? What happened was that I got a really bad haircut, which I tried to grow out for two months. Then I went to MN and asked a friend of mine that’s a hairstylist if she could fix it. She said no, so she chopped it all off and I’m starting over. The new avatar will be around until I have more hair again (I’m guessing 6 months, or maybe 9 … or 12). Eep!

Updates and new plans: A while back I announced that I was taking a break from Twitter, Facebook and the BlueBoards. The break was supposed to be for four months. Shortly after my update for the first month I had to answer a message on Facebook (for a commitment I’d previously agreed to). Since I was going on to Facebook, I also decided to visit Twitter and the BlueBoards. It was really hard to tear myself away again. For me, a month wasn’t long enough. After two months, I was cruising along, getting work done and blogging. Now it’s three months later and for me, three months is enough. I miss my friends and the industry news and the fun of hanging out online. So, I’m going to start (slowly) getting back into things. I might still take a few days off here and there, or a week, or maybe even a month if I have a deadline. That seems like the smart thing to do when I need to work and/or clear my head. However, as important as it was for me to step back and catch my breath, it’s even more important for me to jump back in. It’s more fun, not to mention more inspiring and productive to be surrounded by all the wonderful and creative children’s book people online!

p.s. Now that I’m home again, I’ll be posting notes from the LA conference and a new website design soon!

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I’ve been painting tiny pictures lately (see the elephant here and the bunnies here), in order to fit painting for fun into my schedule. My third tiny painting was a girl blowing a bubble with her bubblegum. I broke out my watercolors and colored pencils and painted a picture so horrible that I had to rip it up. Seriously. All it takes to ruin a small watercolor painting is a couple of misplaced brush strokes. However, I still liked the sketch, so I made the bubblegum girl into a digital illustration. The image is 2″ x 2″ like the paintings.

I like how she turned out, but I still wanted to paint something. A picture of a cow blowing a bubblegum bubble seemed like a fun take on the original, and worked out well, because it fits several art prompts all at once (see list below the picture). I used watercolor and colored pencil to make the image. I’m happy with the way both pictures turned out, but I have to say, the more I look at them, the weirder they look. Of course, if you looked at a photograph showing a side view of someone blowing a bubblegum bubble, that would probably look weird after a while, too.

The CBIG prompt this month is fantasy – a cow blowing bubblegum bubbles is definitely fantasy! Bubblegum Girl also works for fantasy. She wants to blow the biggest bubble ever and win the national bubblegum bubble blowing contest (which they actually have – I saw it on TV a couple of years ago).

The Watercolor Wednesdays prompt for last week was to create a greeting card image for a child – the bubblegum sort of looks like a speech balloon, where the cow could say, “Happy Birthday!” Bubblegum Girl also works for this week’s prompt, to illustrate a favorite toy or game … not  that gum qualifies as a toy, but trying to blow the biggest bubble could be a game, so I think that counts (or at least it works for me – I went to art school; I can justify anything).

The Illustration Friday prompt this week is brave – that cow is really brave to be blowing bubblegum bubbles. What if it pops and goes all over her face? Bubblegum Girl also works for brave. She knows what will happen if the bubble as big as her head pops!

Are tiny paintings the next big thing? Maybe not, but I’m having fun with them

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October was unseasonably cool. The newsmen claimed it had been the wettest one on record, too.

One day, late in the month, the sun battled its way through the ever present clouds and shined briefly on the world.

Juan and Levont took advantage of the break to burn off energy at the neighborhood playground in the watery sunlight.

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I painted this one with cut up sponges (except the vampire). I painted the vampire with brushes to set him apart from the rest of the class. I thought the texture would be fun, and it is, except that the painting was too small (8.5 x 11) or the sponges were too big to make it look the way I wanted it to. Still, it’s something I might play around with again in the future, or use brushes to try to re-create the texture. 

Eddie was out sick the day Ms. MacDonald’s class decided to dress up as farm animals for the class party. Everyone forgot to tell Eddie when he came back.

 The chicken costume is my favorite.

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The image is brighter than it scanned in as a jpg.

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Can you dig it...
It takes a whole lotta lessons to become a master of the blues...

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I'm currently reading Nicholson Baker's forthcoming book Human Smoke (excellent so far, but I've really only just begun it), so it was with particular interest that I took a glance at his new essay, "The Charms of Wikipedia", in The New York Review of Books. I intended to set it aside for later reading, but it was quite engaging, and I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, so before long I found myself completely engrossed. And often laughing:

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard's one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you're going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): "HES A BIG STUPID HEAD." James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons—a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball.

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals—up to a point—the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say "Hi"

The End.

Even the interesting article on culture jamming has been hit a few times: "Culture jamming," it said in May 2007, "is the act of jamming tons of cultures into 1 extremely hot room."

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