I'm outta here!

The children's book is finished and has been sent off to be printed. I am officially on holidays and won't be updating my blog until after September 9th.

More Process

Here's the rest of the process photos I mentioned the other day.
The book is pretty much finished, I'm just making the final adjustments to the files. My husband printed out some color copies for me at his work yesterday (he works in printing). He even trimmed them and bound them so I could see what the book will look like. I'm pretty happy with it. I can't wait to see it all finished.

Happy Day

This is the final version of what the cover will look like (except that it looks a bit washed out here).


© 2007

Dario's been gone almost a week, but he'll be home in a few hours :)
And I finished the last painting for the children's book this afternoon :)
And I'm almost finished tweaking the design :)

It's a good day.

Process for cover painting

My husband has been gone for several days now and I've been quite busy. I'm still choked about having to cancel a week of vacation plans, but we managed to move our holiday to the following week and have worked out an alternate plan. I'm just really looking forward to a break. I desperately need one.

I'm almost finished the book. I'm half way through my second last painting. I have one more to do after that, something for the title page, but I haven't figured out exactly what I'm doing yet. I don't want to just duplicate the cover. I'm thinking something simple...

I took some photos of the cover at different stages of completion. Here's some of my process:













I have a few more process pics from some other paintings for this book project but I'll have to post those later as that's all the time I have for now.

Painted cover... and summer woes...

© 2007

Here's the painted front and back covers for the Children's book I'm working on. I'm pretty happy with the colours in the original painting, but depending on which computer screen I see it on, the colours can look quite acidic. I really hope the colours come out okay when it gets printed.

After 3 months of not seeing my friends and having no life and working full time during the day at a design job and then working on this book project the rest of the time, I'm almost finished all the paintings. I can't wait to be done. I've enjoyed the project, I've learned a lot and hopefully this will help open some doors for me illustration wise (it would be nice to be able to quit that design job...) but it's been crazy and I'm pretty much burnt out. I won't be posting any more of the finished paintings until after the book is published, but I do have some process stuff that I'll be putting up in the days to come.

After all this (and numerous problems and stresses at my design job) I was looking forward to a week of holidays the last week of August, but I found out this afternoon that my days off have been revoked. Another woman in my department is going to be gone at the same time and we can't both be gone (I was originally told it didn't matter, but apparently it does). So that really sucks. My husband's band, Ahnabith Gish, is playing in the Shine Through Rain Music Festival near Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was really looking forward to attending that and then spending a few days in Winnipeg as I have never been there. Then we were going to visit some of my family before going to my parent's place in Saskatchewan for a party in honour of our recent marriage. We'll still be going to my parent's place, but the 9 days of vacation prior to that are now pooched. I'm pretty bummed.

front & back cover sketches

Here's the sketch for the front & back cover of the children's book I've been slaving away on for the past two and a half months. I think I might have inadvertantly squished this scan of it a bit in photoshop because it looks a bit weird to me, but you get the idea. I'm going to put the title of the book on the fence and my name and the author's name will go at the bottom. The back cover will have a synopsis of the story on the sheet tacked to the fence.


© 2007

Utne illo: Please Mr. Postman

This is my illustration from the June issue of the Utne Reader. I really should have written about this sooner, but with all the chaos around the book I'm working on, it slipped my mind. It was my first time being published in an American magazine so it was a big deal for me. Hopefully some of you saw it. It's a really good issue.

The art director at the Utne Reader was awesome to work with, I hope they hire me again some time.

Cabin Fever

My friend Karen Klassen, an amazing illustrator, recently started a line of home accessories that feature her illustrations. It's called Cabin Fever. It's vintage inspired and really cool. Check it out at her etsy store: karenhascabinfever.etsy.com


This is one of her tea towels that I picked up a little while ago.

Color comp of Nola and her Dad

© 2007

I did this comp a little while ago in order to figure out what colors I wanted to use. I also wanted to see how their markings were going to look.

Sketch of Nola pointing

© 2007

I think this is one of the last sketches that I have for the children's book I'm working on. I changed the graffiti on the fence to be more of a scribble. The way I did it in this sketch makes it look like a word. Everyone I showed it too was trying to figure out what it said.

The space on the left is for text.

Nola and her dad at the party

© 2007

The space at the bottom is for text.