Stories For Children Magazine illo's

Here are a couple of illo's I just finished for Stories for Children Magazine. The top is a coloring page and the bottom is for a story (Friends or Losers -- check it out in October). I've never painted autumn trees before and it was really fun to do this time. I also really enjoy doing line drawings. It's fun for me to express things with the thickness of the lines. 

Watercolor Wednesdays

Here are my most recent contributions to Watercolor Wednesdays. The top is Noah creating an umbrella (before receiving instructions to build an ark) and the next is of a daddy dancing with his daughter. 

I like the idea of Noah (my husband's) and the way I drew him, but I'm not as satisfied with the colors and the feel of the whole illustration.

I'm pretty happy with the way the dancers turned out. I love dancing and twirling around in dresses and LOVED it when I was a kid. I was experimenting with this girl's dress by using various rounds of salt in watercolor and feel it turned out well.

More pictures

Here are a couple of illo's I've done recently. The top is for a story in this month's issue of Stories For Children Magazine (The Monstrous Mile; my illo didn't get anti-aliased and looks really grainy, however) and the bottom illo is for last week's Watercolor Wednesday (the prompt was a tribute to Beatrix Potter).

I feel like I am progressing as an illustrator. Besides the fact that I feel like I'm spending so much time and energy being a mom (to two amazing children), I'm amazed that I've been able to progress at all. I attribute a lot of my success to the fact that we frequently visit the zoo, the aquarium, and museums, that I'm constantly around children, and that my oldest son and I read a lot of books. All of these things give me an opportunity to examine real life things and to scrutinize what works and what doesn't in children's book illustrations. Although I feel like I'm improving, I also recognize that I have a LONG way to go. I feel like I'm truly ready and good enough to do magazine illo's (and a book if an editor thinks so too) . . . but I still want to be better. There are days when I feel like I'll never be as good as I want to be, but I am mostly optimistic. 

Enough blabbering. It's time for me to go do what I've been dreaming about all day while playing with my kids.