Sometimes the old gags are the best ones. This is week five of my 52-week drawing challenge. I was so happy with how the expressions came out for my April Fool’s bees. I also had a nice opportunity to play around with some different digital brushes for painting in the foliage.
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.
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.
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
What better way to get into the springtime spirit than with two cute kissing bees? This marks week one of my 52-week drawing
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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…
