The cookbook I illustrated now in print

The cookbook I illustrated (written by the magnificent Melissa Machowski of M Delish Boutique) is now in the printing process! Melissa and I had a fantastic time working together, and I'm thrilled about this whole project.

It's our first run of 50, so there could be some hiccups, but we'll be signing all of them, and I'll consider these 50 the "collector's edition." (:

To order yours, you can visit Melissa's Etsy shop here.

Here's a little preview....

Another year of the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search

On Friday, I submitted my entry for the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search. This was my third year of creating work for this competition, and it proved to be as challenging and rewarding as ever.

This year, we were given a story about a fictitious young woman who lived in Brooklyn. The brief showed us a picture of her (and her clothing style), where she shopped, where she worked, products she'd buy, products she sold in her shop, the food truck she stopped at, and so on. With this type of person in mind, the assignment was to create a patterned sneaker that she could wear when she bicycled to work. The patterned shoe also needed to incorporate at least one word, hand-written or an actual font.

Although I really liked this approach of getting a visual story about the client, I did find it tricky to create something for a person I couldn't really relate to, while still keeping myself in the art. So I focused on whatever images I was drawn to in the brief.

In her shop, she sold some darker, occult-type of items, so I decided to go with a crow theme. They are one of my favorite birds – strong, smart and ominous, and I knew I would enjoy drawing them.

She also sold some pretty, Parisian-style gifts, which made me envision using a loose, dreamy watercolor style for my pattern.

I drew my shoe template with a sharpie, painted several crows (you can see one of them here), and this is the mockup I submitted, followed by the actual pattern...

You can see my 2014 and 2013 submissions here and here.

Your comments are always welcome!

Free coloring pages!

For a recent assignment, I drew my own shoe template. Now I can't stop drawing on it with my Artwin marker...

Here are a couple of my doodles. Feel free to download these images here (each is saved as a JPG and a PDF), print them out and color them for yourself. I'd love to see what you come up with, so please find me on Facebook, twitter or Instagram and post for me to see!

Loving my new Artwin watercolor pen

I'm loving my new Artwin watercolor pen. I find it lends itself to the quick gesture sketches that I really enjoy creating, and the set up and clean up is minimal.

Here's a crow I painted yesterday in the few minutes before dusk turned to night...

Birds and Hearts

Yesterday, I remembered to create an illustration for Illustration Friday's weekly challenge. The word was "Heart." Here are a couple collages I came up with...

Sketching on the plane

We've been traveling a lot over the past few weeks, and I always look forward to the free time on the plane to sketch. Here are a couple of my favorites...

Silkscreening t-shirts for a Pokémon birthday

For my son's 7th birthday party, I decided to silkscreen t-shirts for all the guests to take home with them. Archer is really into Pokémon right now, so he and I looked through several books to find the right Pokémon character for our tees. We finally agreed on Fletchling. It's a cute, typically-peaceful Pokémon, and I felt it could be simplified fairly easily.

After I received my Speedball Fabric Screen Printing Kit and my t-shirts, I procrastinated for several days before even opening the packages. I haven't attempted a silkscreen print since the 90s, and I don't remember ever using drawing fluid, so I was pretty nervous about the results.

Eventually, I brought out the screen, and sketched Fletchling onto it with pencil. Then, with as steady a hand as I could muster, I painted with the Speedball Drawing Fluid. It looked like this:

After the drawing fluid dried completely, I squeegeed on the Speedball Screen Filler....

After the filler dried, I rinsed the screen under cool water, which dissolved the drawing fluid, and I set it out to dry again:

It came out okay, but, as you can see, there was screen filler in his eye, and the filler had also bled into the top of his beak and wing (I'm assuming my drawing fluid was too thin). With a cotton swab and detergent, I scrubbed the screen filler out of these areas, and then touched up the edges with screen filler and a paintbrush.

Once that dried, I was ready to print. I stuffed a piece of waxed paper inside each t-shirt to prevent the ink from bleeding through. I then laid the screen on top of the tee, added a thick line of fabric ink at the top, and my son squeegeed the ink across the screen and onto the shirt.

It was a fun process to do together, and we ended up with about 30 tees that looked like this:

Overall, it was a success. The kids seemed to like them a lot, Archer and I were able to create something together, and I tried a new art process.

Have questions or suggestions? Your comments are always welcome!