Birdwoman

To compensate for my recent blogging negligence, I've super-saturated this post with images. I do hope that that makes up a little bit for my bad ways.

I've been continuing my work to develop an illustration style appropriate for children's picture books. I feel like I already have a pretty good handle on a style for kids 9–14. But in order to present myself as a more versatile illustrator, I want to adapt my style and way of working to even younger kids. Here's my most recent study:

I really liked this little painting, but for some reason I got it into my head that I should work with a brighter palette. Here's what happened with that:It's a bit difficult to see (on my monitor at least) but the result was downright lurid. A kind of one-note Disney knock-off palette that made my stomach lurch uncomfortably. I can't stand it when people talk down to kids, and between you and me, this use of color is one big visual "coochy, coochy coo." So I've decided to abandon this one and go back to my more subdued colors. What can I say? They just feel right to me.

Here's the finished version of a graphite illustration geared toward that 9–14 age group:

I'm also very excited to be participating in a moleskine sketchbook exchange. This particular exchange was organized by my college classmate (Wellesley '01 baby!), Sarah. Here's a blog written by another group of moleskine exchanging artists, so that you can get a better idea as to what the heck I'm talking about. The idea behind ours is this: 10 artists each buy one japanese accordion moleskine book and fill the first six pages with whatever our creative little hearts desire. Then each artist sends her book to the next artist, who in turn, fills the next six pages of the book and sends it off to the next artist, etc....By the end of the project everyone will have created an image/images in everyone else's book. Likewise, each of us will have a book containing the work of nine other artists. Here's what I came up with to kick off our moleskine exchange:

Here's a detail: