What's On My Desk? Squeak Squeak!

This is a tiny corner of a gouache painting in progress. With any luck, it'll be completed in a few days and I will submit it for the Lilla Rogers Global Talent Search. I've enjoyed watching friends participate in her Make Art That Sells course, so this was one way for me to get a taste of the action. I'll share the final piece after the deadline next week. I'll also share the internally-dramatic journey I needed to take to get to a final direction for the submission. More to come! And good luck to any readers out there who are also submitting for the contest!!!

Back to School with Lilla Rogers

Well, we've wrapped up the first session of Lilla Rogers' e-course, Making Art That Sells. Five weeks went by so fast! We have a couple of months off, and then Part B starts up in the Fall. Can't wait!

The assignment for this final week was to create a Hyper Lush zipper bag. Basically you throw in tons and tons of imagery. Busy is good. I fight with this concept all the time in my picture book work as I can get very busy and have to edit, edit, edit. But with this assignment it was all ok. Open the flood gates!

I added patterns, textures and icons from previous projects with this class, and also from some of my past picture books. There is a flower pattern from "Picnic at Camp Shalom," and photos of flowers from my garden. This project is great for mixing photography and painted art.

The work that has come out of this class is outstanding. I've learned so much, not only from a licensing point of view, but also techniques that I can carry over into my picture book work.

Lilla's class starts again in the Fall. If you have the time, I highly recommend it. You can find all the information on her website here. 

Back to School with Lilla Rogers

One of my goals this year was to spend a little more time on personal art projects that would stretch me a bit, loosen up the creative flow and just allow me to play around. Unfortunately, I tend to put personal things on the back burner when I'm busy with deadlines for clients. And then a whole year goes by and suddenly you realize you've done nothing about what was once such a great idea!

So when I saw the posting for Lilla Rogers e-course on Making Art That Sells, I thought it would a perfect opportunity for me to get charged up to create and experiement with some new art and have a specific framework of goals to keep me on track. The class is five weeks and each week we explore a different aspect of the licensing world. This week happened to be picture books.

The story we illustrated was a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson called the "Snail and the Rose Tree."  We could illustrate the cover of the book, or a spread, but the requirements were that we needed to create a compelling character (the snail), an environment, and incorporate some hand-lettering.

The snail was a thinker, but also pompous and arrogant and he sheltered in place his whole life living within his shell.

But the rose tree lived a very charmed and easy life with great meaning, blooming year after year.

There are only a few days allowed to complete the assignments, so I had to limit the amount of time I obsessed over this piece. Otherwise, I probably would never have finished it. I learned some new things with the hand-lettered type (not so easy to do, but adds a lot of charm to an illustration). Drawing from life for reference keeps elements of the illustration from being too generic looking. I tend to draw from my head, but if I look at reference, I can find all kinds of little details that make the illustration more interesting. The green vine growing over the snail was a plant I found out on my morning walk and I added it in at the very end. One of my favorite elements as it gives the feeling that the snail has been sitting in the same spot for a very long time!

Lilla Rogers is an international licensing agent, teacher, author and award-winning artist. You can visit her website here. This class will be offered again in October.