wisdom from Jon Burgerman

I just watched this short clip of John Burgerman. It's fantastic, at 2:56  he offers great wisdom for life as he speaks about the mental well being that comes from allowing oneself to let go, to play and to create.

12x12

This year in addition to working on my illustrations, I am keen to start writing a little more.

To keep myself accountable and moving forward I signed up for Julie Hedlund's 12x12 Challenge. It's such a great group of writers - so encouraging and motivated! So here I go, with plans on writing 12 stories this year.

#kidlitart28 day challenge is underway!

The #kidlitart28 day challenge began yesterday. So through the month of February I'll be trying to post a sketch everyday on Instagram and on my blog.

These challenges are always great at encouraging me to be consistent. The best part, is that there's always improvement when one is drawing every day.

Manga Hair

I am so excited to have the opportunity to be a candidate to illustrate a book by a published author. I am working on two spreads that will act as my 'test' so see if my style fits, etc...

I am really happy with the compositions that I've settled on, I just have to finish the actual painting. I am still toying with the hair...for some reason the hair styles I've chosen don't seem to be quite right for the characters, but I have just come across two sheets of manga hair online that have given me some better ideas....

Joh Klassen

Such a great little clip by John Klassen on his creation of a character and giving them emotion.

I can't say how much I love this post...

It's PiBoIdMo as well this month. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate the honest in Karen Henry Clark's post here. And I have always loved "Sweet Baby Moon" since I first saw Patrice Barton's sketches.

It's SkADaMo!

I love this challenge! Thanks Linda Silvertri for getting us going each year.  Follow participants by searching #SkADaMo

Color

On to my second skillshare class with Brad Woodward ...this time we are talking about color.

Did you know that Adobe has a crazy colorwheel web page you can play around with to create color palettes??  Never saw this before. It is wild!

There is also a neat and quick tutorial on color palettes here.

Apparently these are great books that I need to look into...one on pantones and one on modern design and  color.

sketching and creativity

I started a really interesting Skillshare class by Brad Woodward today. He included some great references related to his class. I hope it's okay to make a record of them here so I can go back to them.

Firstly - a neat video on creativity. It's posted on Brad's blog, which is another wonderful reference by the way.  Along with this link were others that took me to a neat post on sketching, a post on sketching as a visual power tool, and a post on Inspiration vs. Imitation.

It's a great class so far, I'm really looking forward to it. Check it out at Skillshare.

**Please note this image was created by Brad Woodward, copied from his blog post here.

number five bus

So how cool is it to be a fly on the wall to an email conversation between two (or three) bookmakers?  So cool right?!  It almost sounds too good to be true, but no - check out number five bus where Phil and Erin Stead do just that!