Spicebox

Sometimes, an idea takes a number of revisions to get it right. Other times, you strike gold on the first try. When my amazingly talented roommate, Lis, hired me to create a poster for the belly dance show she was producing, I had a definite vision in mind.

We went from this...

 

...to this...

 

...in about a week. The show was a great success and a perfect treat for the holidays!

Lifestraw

Scientists are amazing and do things I could never do. But there's usually a point in the process where you hire an artist to take amazingly complex ideas and inventions and dumb them down into visuals for the rest of us.

For example: from this...

 

To this...

You can buy your own LifeStraw here.

#ny13scbwi

1)  A huge thanks to Yellow House NYC, for granting me the professional stipend to attend this year's conference.

2)  I like going to SCBWI conferences - they keep giving me books!  I won the last book at the illustrator's intensive again this year.  This time around I received Winds ~ A Legend from the Lower Yukon.  Like a lot of legends, it has more text than your typical children's book.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to setting aside some quiet time to do so (preferably on a snowy day with a cup of tea).

New Alistair Art

Before I tackle my SCBWI 2013 Winter Conference megapost, I wanted to brag a bit about how awesome my promo postcards turned out.  I think I've finally figured out how to do the color in my 'Alistair' finals.  I wasn't happy with the watercolor/colored pencil finals I'd done last year - one looked too soft and babyish and the other was a legitimate mess. 

I'd meant to work on them again before the conference, and ... didn't.  Fast forward to this past Sunday and the sort of inspiration that only last-minute panic can inspire - armed with a few new sets of Photoshop brushes, I went to work on one of the most polished sketches in the book.  I finished it that evening and sent it off to Vistaprint immediately.  The postcards arrived Wednesday evening (thank god). I braced myself as I opened the package, having suffered over-saturation and muddy or unbalanced colors from practically every other print shop I've ever frequented.

The color was perfect, with a nice, subtle warmth the internet version above just doesn't convey.* Four for you, Vistaprint!

But back to the actual artwork... contrary to the promo image, Alistair and his sister inhabit a kind of retro, upper-crusty version of New York City.  (Think Eloise, but with sibling drama and rhyme.)  For the shape of the characters, I took my inspiration from the logo of my aunt's former restaurant, La Niçoise. 

(Speaking of which, I feel Pixar owes my aunt, and her late husband's business partners, royalties for the roller-skating French waiter idea.  Alfredo even looks a bit like my uncle.  Just saying...)

Obviously, the La Niçoise logo owes everything to John Held Jr.'s flapper illustrations.  I imagine a little bit of Tintin snuck into my sketches as well.  I "watched" Jeeves and Wooster to keep me company as I colored as well.

The cover still looked a little flat, even with the new brushes, so I merged it with the traditional watercolor/colored pencil version I'd completed earlier.  The earlier final had looked a bit rough in places, so adding the scratchy contrast of the pencil lines to smoother digital coloring added just the right amount of texture.  I'm looking forward to doing more images in this style! 

*As I was apparently too lazy to convert the file to RGB before saving it for online use.