Highlights Nov Issue

Skinny? You won't be after you eat a full Thanksgiving meal! I have this illustration accompanying Donna Earnhardt's lovely poem in the November issue of Highlights magazine.

Pumpkin Carving

Took a break tonight to carve a pumpkin. I like how this smily monster turned out.

Illustration Friday - Fast

These are some fast sketches I did of people around me while standing in line for hours a couple days ago.

Highlights Illustrators' Party

Highlights throws an Illustrators' Party Weekend every year. They invited us out to their beautiful headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania and wined and dined us (well, I didn't have any wine because of the baby). There were activities all weekend long including a costume party, bbq, square dance, lamb roast, hayride, pumpkin painting, portfolio time, and so on. I loved meeting so many illustrators and especially my fabulous art director from Highlights Magazine, Cindy Smith. Incredible weekend!


The theme of the costume party was to dress up as our favorite day of the year. I chose World Tourism Day and piled on stuff from all over the world. Casey chose National Kick Butt Day and wore his tae kwon do uniform with a butt-shaped sign pinned to his butt that said, "Kick here!" Only one guy attempted to kick him. I took a few people out with my huge sombrero though.







Near Highlights and Boyds Mills offices. We took the lovely back roads thanks to our handy iPhones.

This is the lake next to our cabin. Gorgeous! We took a paddle boat out for a bit and got our butts wet due to a broken rudder.



Casey and I made the Highlights weekend into a 30-hour weeklong roadtrip and visited friends along the way. It was a beautiful time for driving and being 6 months pregnant was fine for a roadtrip. Baby Valiant did great!

Illustration Contest Win!

This past weekend was the Midsouth SCBWI conference in Nashville for children's book writers and illustrators. I won the illustration contest there - whoo hoo! The Art Director from Henry Holt, Patrick Collins, gave the illustrators text from a couple picture book manuscripts, and we painted a spread from one of the books for the contest. The text on my illustration above is from the picture book, Don't Lick the Dog, written by Wendy Wahman.

The conference was fabulous and I intend to blog some of my notes next week. Right now I'm heading out on a roadtrip to the Highlights for Children Illustrator's Weekend and to visit friends on the way. Highlights magazine hosts an Illustrator's Weekend every year where they invite their illustrators to eastern Pennsylvania to relax, view portfolios, square dance, and get dressed up in crazy costumes. I'm excited!

Book Dummy - take 2

I posted a different color version of this a couple weeks ago, but since then I decided to experiment with the background color to make the penguins stand out more and also added the white sketchy background.

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty & Illustration Friday

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty is a super fun blog where children's book illustrator Aaron Zenz posts artwork by his talented kids. For the blog's three year anniversary, Aaron wanted to do something special for the kids, so he invited anyone to recreate one of the kids' drawings in their own style. I thought Isaac's drawing of a hippo hanging in a bat cave was simply genius, so that's the one I chose to wrap in my own style and paint tonight.

by Isaac, age 10

Color Spread

Click on the image to see it larger.

Here's the color version of a spread from my picture book dummy that I promised you in my last post. When I submit my sketch dummy of my own picture book manuscript to publishers, I'll also send along a couple full-color spreads so that they can see what the finished art would look like. Actually, I'll be submitting to agents first who handle picture book author/illustrators. I've never submitted my work to agents before, so I'm starting to gather info for a dream agent list.

My Picture Book Dummy

(Click image to see it larger)

The penguins were too impatient to wait for food - they found their own.

I'm working on my picture book dummy right now, and it's so much fun! I plan on painting this sketch soon, so check back for the color version. If you write a picture book manuscript, you submit just the manuscript without illustrations to publishers to see if they will acquire it. But since I want to do both the writing and illustrating, I draw sketches for my whole picture book manuscript that I've written and submit those sketches along with the text as a small mock-up of my picture book called a dummy or sketch dummy.

Book Signing Fun

My Cora Cooks Pancit book signing was a smashing hit! Barnes & Noble sold out of the books they ordered for the signing, and then they sold 12 of my own copies that I brought in as backup. How fun is that!

The most fun part of it for me was seeing lots of friends from church, neighbors, in-laws, SCBWI friends, and friends of my mother-in-law (she sent the announcement to everyone she's ever known). It was quite the party! I brought a big pot of pancit and my husband handed out samples the whole time while I signed and chatted and hugged and "Wow - I haven't seen you in 2 months!" There was a lot of that, because I've been in bed for 2 months with severe morning sickness and dizziness. Being in the second trimester now rocks!