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Illustration contest submission for Jane Yolen's "Infirm Pachyderm". As one can see, I have been heavily involved with elephants lately. Nothing wrong with that! The New England SCBWI Conference (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) is only a couple weeks away. I had to pause portfolio preparations to submit to this year's poster illustration contest: Jane Yolen's poem "Infirm Pachyderm". My gut reaction to the first 30 or so reads were all somber. I wanted to gauge other illustrator's responses, so I preformed an image search... same reactions there. Since the poem is written for an audience that's Middle Grade age group at max, I wanted to illustrate a positive spin on the poem's outcome. Construction the illustration was a little less positive. I'm going to admit I have a weakness with Black & White drawing, so naturally I wanted to cut TONS of grey-scale images! Since my technique dwells on paper tex...

I submitted my illustration for SCBWI's Tomie dePaola, with only 10 minutes to spare. I'm incredibly grateful the drop-dead time was in Pacific Time. I chose to illustrate the famous white washing scene. As you see above, the illustration was intended to be in black and white, but I found I could control the contrast better working in full color and then just "gray-scaling" the finished illustration. Also please ignore any and all "wonky" looking colors. Again, I was pushing for contrast. Fingers are crossed!

It's been a slow  start for me, but I do have a couple more pieces hoisted up on Scribed for downloading and printing. I've reconfigured my promotional postcards to make them accessible to everyone for personal use. Yes - simply for the enjoyment of cutting and pasting/assembling things. It would have been easier just popping the postcards on the website as they were, but I didn't want weirdos calling or stalking me, so I had to adjust the postcards a bit. I also had to scale them down a touch to fit for the every-day household printer. In the "Playground" the Printable Giraffe and Turtle are linked to my Scribed account for public downloading... or you can click the links here ;-) Have fun playing!

Participating in the Doedemee charity book cover project brought me back to my old book re-covering exercise from several years back. I've decided to pick the project back up again, and I've just begun taking my old sketches, and turning them into full-scaled finished pieces. By "full-scaled" I mean 12" x 18" posters. Other than the Scarlet Letter , you'll see my most recent conquest ( Moby Dick ,) which was one of the original classics from my old exercise. Hopefully to follow: The Great Gatsby , One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and Lolita. My "Recovering Project" is helping me ease back into my cut-paper methods. Moby Dick here is comprised of torn paper and digital media.

Been working here and there on a book (re-covered) project for the DoeDeMee cover project for illiteracy . Below are some of my sketches rendered as I read through my book choice, The Scarlet Letter . As of a few nights ago, I had my poster looking like so: ... But something was missing. I picked this novel for the sake of the story's message on identity. Upon looking at other covers throughout time, there were a couple recurrent themes: Hester & Child (Pearl) and the big red "A". These characters actually become what the "A" symbolizes and I wanted convey with the cover. I think I did this rather successfully transforming these two characters into an "A".  However, there's another character that's typically ignored for cover art, and I really wanted him to have at least a subliminal presence, because without him, there would be no Pearl and thusly no evidence for the need of that adulteress mark: Reverend Dimmsdale. He too...