Progress

It's been a busy week, and I suppose every week should be this busy when I am working on the 12x12 challenge, the PBDummy challenge and the Marks and Splashes course.  I am finding it really hard to put in all the time required, balancing it with day to day responsibilities and being a mom. But from last week's Kitlitart tweet chat I have come to realize that I am certainly not alone, tons of illustrator moms are doing it, so I just need to buck up little camper and get it done! :)

So that was my attitude this week. Some mornings I woke up early, some nights I worked late, but the list got done...and that was during spring break when the kids were home. So pretty good I'd say. 

The big things completed this week were my 12x12 story draft for March (just finished it tonight so under-the-wire but complete), chapter 13 of M&S and a few medium sized compositional and color panels for my picture book dummy. My goal is to complete composition and color studies of all the panels in med size this next week and then I'll have a month to do full scale drawings of the panels.

Better get to work!

Manga hair

Hair has always been a challenge for me to draw. I seem myself getting better as I practice, and Matt from DTO has some great tutorials that have given me some insights into how to draw hair more realistically. But for those times when I want to draw realistic hair that is a little more 'cartoony' I seem to gravitate toward Manga hair.  Here is a great tutorial by Mark Crilley on drawing Manga hair that I watched today.

more photoshop tutorials

Just a quick note of some great tutorials that have been posted by classmates at Marks and Splashes - thanks to all for sharing!

Monster Cutie has posted links to 20 'mighty fine' tutorials, I have tried a couple and loved them all I highly recommend spending some time looking at these.
drawinghowtodraw.com has some great stuff on photoshop, illustrator, using a wacom tablet etc...
Digital Art Secrets has a great post on using traditional painting techniques in Photoshop

tweet chats

In my attempt to take more advantage of social media and learn as much as I can about illustration and kid lit I have been participating in some tweet chats of late. How GREAT is twitter! I came hesitantly into the world of twitter but have found it a wealth of knowledge. But it's the tweet chats that I have been most surprised by.  I have faithfully joined the weekly 7pm MST tweet chat at #kidlitart for the past month.  For illustrators of kidlit it's an amazing resource of author/illustrators sharing knowledge and experience. I highly recommend it. In addition to this tweet chat, Katie Davis, Diane de Las Casas and Elizabeth O. Dulemba host a tweet chat the first Wednesday of each month - with the hash tag - #kidlitPRChat.  Sunday nights there's a group that chat about epublishing and story apps - #storyappchat which my online classmate Syliva Liu often raves about.

So, just to sum up here are some quality tweetchats to tune into, perhaps I'll find you there...
#storyappchat -  9-10pm EST Sundays
#kidlitart - 9-10pm EST Thursdays
#kidlitPRChat - 6-7pm EST the first Wednesday of each month

create your own success

Here is a really great post from The Visual Storyteller's Studio. It's an interview with Bas Waijers who among other thing turned a struggle with publishing a picture book into a successful experience creating a app.  I loved his advice at the end of the post. So much so that I'll include it here:

"Strive to be as good as you can be. And draw as much as you can draw. Each and every drawing makes you better as an artist, never worse. Always keep learning more and absorb the world around you because anything can inspire you. Sketch and save your ideas. And then sketch some more! Put your work out there in the world for people to see. Don’t keep it to yourself! Have a strong and clear online presence. Be objective and only show good work.

Define what you are most passionate about and focus on that, whatever it is. Because that’s most likely what makes you unique.
And most important: Make Believe!"