"What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures" in NYC!!!!

Today is my unbirthday! 

Well, it is almost my birthday (Again! How does this keep happening?), which means it is almost the anniversary of the first query letter I sent... which means I need to hurry and send out more queries before my birthday, so I don't feel bad that I sent out less queries in a whole year, than most writers sent out in an afternoon! 

I did enter every contest I could, but I guess I dilly-dallied a lot on the query front? Ah, well, as Lewis Carroll would say: "I can't go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." I will just have to try and do better this coming year.  :-)

"Dilly-Dallying" pictured above.

Anywho! Enough with the "lack of query sending" guilt! On to what I wanted to talk about!

Okay, so I might have mentioned before that I have a slight obsession with "Alice in Wonderland"...and that might have been lie. Yes, it was definitely a lie.
I don't have a slight obsession, I have a huge obsession with "Alice in Wonderland"! (See "portfolio" for madness references.)

"Alice" is just such a great story, and I love it for many reasons (which I will not bore you with here). 

Anyway, so a few years ago, I was contacted about a super cool project called: "What is the Use of a Book without Pictures?" which, as you might have guessed, was/is an "Alice in Wonderland" project.

The premise of the project was to replace every single paragraph of "Alice" with a full page illustration, and to do so in as many styles as possible. As you might have guessed, I was immediately intrigued by the idea, and leapt right in! It's an international collaboration, and there are hundreds of participating artists! The photo below shows some of the artwork from the project.

All artwork (c) respective owners.

Anyway, I did five illustrations for the project, and after flipping through the digital albums a thousand times, I sort of forgot about it. Now, as it turns out, WITUOABWP is getting its own website, a possible print form, and it will be shown this April at the Lewis Carroll Society Spring Conference in New York City!

YES! YES! YES!
I'm not sure if any of my illustrations will be shown in the presentation, but I am still super excited! If you are in New York City late April, please consider stopping by the conference! Here is some of the event info from Facebook!

https://www.facebook.com/events/514897615286105/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular

If you click "Event Photos," one of my drawings is # 4! "Alice Crying.";-)

Still the Boy with the Bread

I've always wanted to do one of these "illustration process"-things. This is one of the few drawings where I did save jpgs throughout my time working on it, so yay! Now I can! If you click to expand the first drawing, you can click through the slideshow and see the changes applied.=)

This is my TRIBUTE (pun heavily intended) to Suzanne Collins' wonderful "Hunger Games" series. It's one of my favorite series, and this is one of my favorite drawings too. If you type "boy with the bread" (Peeta's nickname) into Google images, this drawing actually shows up on the front page! How cool is that?

1: Sketch!
      Katniss is the "Girl on Fire," so I've always felt like Peeta was the water to Katniss' fire. <3
      Rue, Cinna, Prim, Gale, and Haymitch were originally going to be inserts on the left side, but I
      won't put up a jpg of that since they didn't make the final cut.

2: Lineart!
           Cleaned up the characters with ink, and extended/added detail to the background in pencil!

3: Colored characters!

4:Laying in colors!
              Never really painted trees, so I kinda didn't know what I was doing! These were the original                         colors, and yes, they are quite horrid!=)

5: Final Version!
         Blurred the background elements, added some plants, and darkened everything.

6: Space reserved for possible Future Final Edit!
            I do still occasionally  edit things that bother me.=-)