Happy belated St. Patrick’s Day! This is week four of my 52-week illustration challenge. My little bee has found a leprechaun sleeping next to his pot of gold among the shamrocks. Lucky for the leprechaun, bees don’t need gold.
Author: SJD
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Sleeping Bee
Cute bee spends the night sleeping on a flower under the glow of flickering fireflies. Week three of my 52-week drawing challenge finds a sleeping bee nestled in a flower as lightning bugs float lazily by. Fun fact: bees sometimes stay out too long to fly home safely, so they sleep on flowers overnight. I’m sure it looks exactly like this when they do!
Below you can check out some progress photos. The first is a shot of the image in Photoshop. The second is of the finished inked drawing, which I do traditionally by hand.
Adding color and texture in Photoshop. 
Inking done using a crow quill pen. -
There Is No Planet Bee | #KidLit4Climate
There Is No Planet Bee | #kidlit4climate I was very happy to dedicate this week’s Drawing Challenge illustration to #kidlit4climate. Not only does it support a cause that is very important to me, but it also has given me an opportunity to continue my now-ongoing bee series with There Is No Planet Bee.
UK children’s book illustrator Emma Reynolds is asking the
kidlit community to help support Greta Thunberg, a sixteen-year-old climate activist who has been striking from school every Friday. She has inspired young people all over the world to organize their own strikes and call for climate action, and on March 15th there will be the biggest strike yet. The aim of the #kidlit4climate campaign is to amplify their message. You can learn more about it all here: https://emmareynoldsillustration.com/kidlit4climate
52-Week Drawing Challenge| Week 02 | #kidlit4climate -
Kissing Bees
Two cute bees sharing a kiss inside a Spring flower. What better way to get into the springtime spirit than with two cute kissing bees? This marks week one of my 52-week drawing
challenge . I started planning for this earlier in the month when I was in a bit of a Valentines Day mood. It’s actually my second bee illustration in this style (You can see the first one here.) and I’m starting to really feel like I could happily come up with many more.
Kissing Bees WIP | 52 Week Drawing Challenge UPDATE: My wife pointed out that I accidentally gave the bees and even the ladybug eight legs instead of six! This is the sort of thing I usually am very careful about (my parents were scientists) so of course I had to make some quick edits. Happy, everyone now has the correct number of appendages! You can see horrible spider-bee hybrid monsters in the progress image above.
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Hut Trip Hit List | Ascent
So, what is a Hut Trip Hit List? Turns out it’s a list of the six kinds of people you want to have with you when going on a weekend ski trip in a yurt. I can’t help but notice that “Illustrator” did not make the cut but, if my own skiing skills are any indication, that’s almost certainly for the best. Still, I’m sure I would have a lot of fun camping out in a yurt and sketching the breathtaking views of snow-covered mountains.
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Viking | SCBWI Highlighter
Viking spot illustration for Winter 2019 issue of the SCBWI Highlighter. The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators is using my Viking spot illustration for the SCBWI Highlighter Winter 2019 issue of their newsletter for the Mid-Atlantic. This was a fun little self-promotional piece I did awhile back, and I am very happy to see it in print. It was one of the first illustrations I did after purchasing the Megapack, my first set of digital brushes from the awesome Kyle T. Webster. You can see a larger version below:
Viking -
Three Ganeshas | Sketchbook
Sketchbook drawing, Bali 2018. Ratu Bagus Ashram. Here are a couple of sketchbook drawings I did during my recent trip to Bali, Indonesia. I was there on a meditation retreat at a beautiful center near the island’s biggest volcano, Mt. Agung. The watercolor sketch is of the stairs leading up to the center’s dining hall. From this side, you can see three Ganeshas, two at the base of the stairs, and one at the top.
It’s actually quite difficult for me to sketch in Bali because of how intricately ornate everything is. There is so much beautiful detail on almost every surface that it can be a real challenge finding something simple enough to sketch in a short time.
The only other sketch from my visit is of a Balinese man reading the morning paper, Nusa Bali. This one was done with my trusty Pentel brushpen.
Sketchbook drawing while a Ashram Ratu Bagus, Bali 2018 -
Winter Is Coming…Hopefully
Ok, by this point winter is technically already here but I usually don’t post client work until after it’s published. In any case, I was very happy to have an excuse to draw some Game of Thrones characters before the final season is over. I got Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, his
direwolf Ghost, one of the dragons, and the three-eyed raven all acting as harbingers of the end of pumpkin spice latte season.
This is the first time in a long time that I was able to incorporate something from popular culture into an editorial illustration. It’s also one of the rare Utah Adventure Journal illustrations where I didn’t need to draw someone skiing. (Even rarer considering the article is all about the upcoming ski season.) Now I miss both pumpkin spice lattes and watching new Game of Thrones… -
Inktober 2018: Week 4
Here are the last of my Inktober illustrations. I had such a great time doing these and am a little bit sorry to see this year’s challenge come to a close. Drawing challenges are a great way to improve as an illustrator, as I learned awhile back when I did my first 365 Drawing Challenge. I’m already looking forward to next year’s Inktober! Until then, here’s a couple of my favorites from week four:
You can see the rest of these in my Inktober 2018 Gallery.
