This weekend was the almighty Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators Annual East Coast Conference in NYC (SCBWIAECCNYC).  There was a whole lot of talent crammed into a tiny space, and it was pretty hard to not get excited about making stuff.  The big assignment for the illustration program on Friday was to do an illustration of Snow White’s birthday party.  So what would a bunch of dwarfs give a lovely lady?  A dwarf.  Obviously.

Here's where I started - with a sketch of a crazy old coot and a dwarf.

After that came a couple of stick figures thumbnail sketches, and then came the full sized drawing. The dwarf who volunteered to be wrapped is Fatty.

The finished painting.

Good speakers, valuable information about potatoes, and I was allowed to bring in a $10 BLT I bought outside.

The other day I watched a four foot tall turkey walk down the middle of the street while I ate breakfast. Since then my drawing skills have gone straight down the toilet. I spent two hours drawing this, and it’s not even close to looking how I want it. All it is is a dog to guide people who were looking for my pet portraits website and went to bobbynelson.com by mistake.

I don’t even like the way it looks, but I have to put up something, right? Right? Alright.

I’m pretty sure if I find the turkey all of my troubles will go away.

Here are just some ideas I was putting down based on the page of Rock Mountain that I posted yesterday. Probably the ones I’ll cross off the list first are the first one, which could be seen as Rock about to jump off a cliff, and the third one, which is Rock lying on the ground staring straight up with a blank expression on his face.

I might go with some supercombo of the next two, showing Rock either letting his arms dangle off the side of the mountain or slumping his face in his hands. I definitely want to show the landscape to push the feeling of desolation, but I don’t want it to be so bland that it’ll make kids cry.

Time to do some character studies of Rock Mountain, the main man from the book I’m writing. This is almost exactly like the other sketch I already posted of him, but I did that one four years ago and wanted to make sure I still had him. This drawing is from the part of the story when a moose disproves Rock’s theory on quantum chromodynamics. It’s going to be a great book!