Finished nesting monsters

Here are two pictures of the three finished nesting monsters. I'd love to have time to do more of these.

Nesting Dolls

My roommate picked up some unpainted nesting dolls for me (something I've been trying to find for ages). I finally had a chance to play around with them. I'd love to find more somewhere.

 

The smallest and middle dolls. The purple one opens at the mouth so that he can literally devour the smaller one when it nests inside. 

 This last image is of the largest, which I did a few months ago. I abandoned if halfway because I don't particularly like it and will sand it down and repaint it to belong in a set with the others. The color scheme will probably be orange and red with painted scales.

If I had another set I'd probably do a playful version of the classic Matryoshka (a little like this last image). There's a set of magical Matryoshka in the graphic novel script I wrote this past semester, and after writing about them, I'd like to paint some. The size and shape make them a very interesting canvas.

Trouble

She may inspire a story.

                      involving mischief, of course.

Random Sketch

A random sketch whose tone I partially blame on playing the card game Gloom yesterday afternoon with some other writers.

Post Graduate School...

So after two years spent focused on writing over illustration, I've finally finished up the work for my MFA in Writing for Children. Though my classes have been held at the Eric Carle Museum, they were (mostly) academic and writing-focused. While I've done some sketches for the program, they're not quite ready to be publicly posted yet. The past few months have been spent working on a graphic novel script which I don't intend on illustrating myself. However, because it's incredibly awkward to do a reading of a graphic novel script, I did some quick (speedy, one-take) thumbs for the reading. The hope is that people will be able to draw the connections between the written panel descriptions and my visual suggestions.

So here are two spreads for BABA YAGA'S ASSISTANT (sans text).

Happy Valentine's Day!

Even if Valentine's Day is rotten, there's always the day after, when all the chocolate goes on sale....

Prints

Life's been crazy, what with writing an entire graphic novel script in three weeks (for grad school) and working full-time, but once the script was emailed out, I had a brief moment to do some artwork. Since it's almost valentine's day, I decided to work on some ideas for a rubber block print. I find rubber block prints to be very fast and fun for me to produce, yet there's still a sculptural aspect to making them that I really enjoy.

Here's the very rough sketchbook page with Valentine's day ideas:



Before I started carving the Valentine's image, I found this image that I'd drawn, but not finished carving. As a warm-up I finished carving and printed a proof. I really like this image. Someday, I'd like to have the time to develop both 3-d illustrated picturebooks and one done in prints. I use rubber because it carves easily (minimizing hand injuries). The only drawback is that it wears down quickly when you pint, and can print far fewer images than with linoleum.

Look for the Valentine's day image on Valentine's day!