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YABS poster and postcard

Back in January, the Young Alberta Book Society (YABS) asked me to illustrate a poster and postcard to promote their annual Taleblazers festival to schools and libraries in the province of Alberta. During the festival, authors and illustrators travel around doing presentations for students of all ages.

While brainstorming ideas for the poster and postcard, I was focussing on the purpose of having an author or illustrator speak to a group of students. I think it's about getting kids excited about books and writing and drawing. Making them feel inspired and like they can do it too.  That's what my solution is about.

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illustration related stuff to learn from and be inspire by

I've stumbled accross some illustration related things online over the last few months that I thought were worth sharing...

As anyone who reads this blog can attest to, I am a huge fan of the work of Mr. Oliver Jeffers and I came across 2 really great interviews with him. The first is from The Great Discontent (read it here) and the second is from We Love This Book (read it here).

An other artist whose work I really admire is Jon Klassen and he recently did a pod cast interview on Your Dreams My Nightmares with Sam Webber. You can listen to that interview here.

For those of you on twitter, I highly recommend that you follow an art director named Giuseppe Castellano (@pinocastellano). He works in children's publishing and is constantly tweeting art tips for illustrators. Although his tips are especially helpful to picture book artists, I think they also apply to illustrators in general. Here's an interview he did.

Here are two article that Mr. Castellano tweeted about that I thought had some pretty good information. Here's one about composition, and here's one about the history of children's picture books.

And for all the process junkies out there (like myself), this is how Adam Rex makes a picture book, and this is how Greg Pizzoli does it.

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there's going to be another Charlie book!

Now that the contract is signed and everything is official, I'm really excited to finally be able to share some good news.  I'm going to be illustrating another picture book by Andrew Larsen, titled Charlie's Dirt Day, that will be published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside and released in the fall of 2014.  It's going to be another Tell-Me-More book, providing educational information about compost and gardening.

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