IF Routine

This is an older painting that I already posted on my blog, but I really want to start participating in Illustration Friday again and this painting matches the word for the week the best, so I'm recycling:-) This is a painting I did of Sophia doing a dance ROUTINE to use for thank you cards. I always wanted to be a ballerina when I was a little girl but never got to try it. It was fun living through Sophia while I did this illustration!:-) Make sure to click on it so you can see it better. It's hard to read in this little box.

Sophia

I just realized that I never put on my blog my big news about Sophia! I don't know how big it is now since it happened almost a year ago:-P It's amazing how fast time goes by. Those of you who have read my blog or have seen my website I'm sure know who Sophia is. Sophia started out as my logo but after awhile became more of my mascot. I put drawings of her all over my website and always used her on the cover of my promos I would send to publishers. I always hoped something might happen with her but wasn't sure what. And than about a year ago I got a call from a stamping company called Paper Pretties. They said they loved my style and wanted me to be their illustrator for their new line of stamps. And the best part was that they wanted Sophia to be their main stamping image! I was thrilled of course and it's been going great ever since. We've come up with a few other characters since than but Sophia is definitely the main image that I draw for them. She's evolved quite a bit from the little girl in the green dress and polka dotted hat that she started out as. She's gotten to be quite a bit of other things, such as a cowgirl in this image:-)



So when I was trying to think of an image to put on my new promo going out, I decided to do Sophia and bring her back to her roots a little bit. So these are the images I came up with. I had an idea to dress her up in Sherlock Holmes fashion awhile ago and thought I would include her green dog as well. This first image will be on the cover of the promo and the second image will be peeking around the edge of the last page of the promo. I'm liking how the promo came out and am hoping the publishers will as well!





And last but definitely not least, a HUGE HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my friend Piya who is an amazing illustrator:-) You can check out his blog or website on my sidebar. HAPPY BIRTHDAY PIYA!!

More Penguins

Here is another painting that I did for the penguin project that I mentioned in my last post. The interesting thing about this one is that the art director gave me a sketch for the composition to follow. I've never had an art director do that before, but I actually didn't mind because I think the composition is fantastic. I'm definitely storing it away in my head to use some other time. In my own compositions, I tend to feel like every corner of the page needs to be filled with something, so to leave so much white was new for me, but I think it came out really balanced. As I said before, I had a blast doing this book, I loved giving all of these penguins their own personality:-) Hope you all are having a good week, weekends almost here! Until next time:-)

I Am Still Alive!

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post! Trying to get my book done pretty much dominated all my time for awhile. But now it is finished and I'm hoping I'll get to share some of the illustrations with you soon! While trying to finish my book I'm afraid I kind of got out of the habit of blogging. But a couple of days ago I decided to start another blog to post all of my crafty hobby projects on and realized how much I missed blogging and how much fun it can be! So now that I'm back in the swing of it, you should be seeing this updated much more regularly:-) For now, I'm going to share an illustration I did awhile back for EECI. They are a publishing company that does a lot of educational material. The assignment was to do a short book, about 15 pages long, all about penguins. I have to say, I had so much fun doing this book. The publisher gave me a lot of freedom in what I wanted to add to the art. I loved creating my own little penguin village, and just painting all of those penguins was a blast! If anyone else needs a penguin illustration, I'll do it in a heartbeat!;-)