Ever since the cards arrived yesterday, armed bandits have been trying to break into my house to pillage them, so get them while you can.  All the info you’ll ever want is right here.  I’d much rather you have a Merry Christmas than some gun-toting goon.

Last year around this time I started working on an illustration to use for Christmas cards. I’m setting up a new one right now. This year has Santa riding a bucking Rudolph on a cliff overlooking a sea of rooftops and chimneys, ready for some serious biznass. I got the idea when I wanted to combine my love of Santa with my semi-liking of cowboys. These bad boys should hopefully be available for purchase on the main site at some point in the next month and a half, so check back if you want to inject some Wild Wild West into your December.

Here’s the image I used last year:

Also, sorry for that giant chasm of time where nothing was posted on here.

I have a whole bundle of stuff going on right now, but none of it is anything pretty to look at, so next week I guess I owe you big time. Part of what I’m doing right now is preparing a mailing that I’ll be sending out to children’s magazine publishers in the next couple of weeks. This is my first major mailing, so I want to make sure I don’t make a daggum fool out of myself. It’s basically a manila envelope with a postcard and one of these bad boys:

Since I’m doing a lot of thumbnail sketches for my book right now, I figured it might be a good idea to show you how important a thumbnail is, even though it might look like I drew it with my feet while fending off a wild turkey. So here is the evolution of a page from the first book I illustrated, The Really Jealous Jimmy Crab by Nancy S. Mure, from thumbnail sketch to finished painting. This is the second page of the book, which introduces the main character and basically just describes what he looks like.

This here is the party animal of the artistic process, the always outrageous thumbnail sketch. This one was only about an inch by an inch and a half – it mainly just acts as a trigger to remind me of how I see everything in my head. The arrow shows the direction of the light source, and “busy” means busy.

After I do the thumbnail, I do a rough composition of the page – this one was about three inches by four inches. It helps me tighten up the image a little more, getting a better idea of how many characters are in the piece and what each one is doing. I scan in the drawing afterwards and color it roughly in Photoshop to figure out the color scheme. Usually I do three or four per rough.

Next up I do the finished drawing. Normally I would shade it, but this project had a seriously short time frame, so I had to speed it up and stick with a line drawing. Everything’s in place here and ready to come alive.

And in the end I transfer the final drawing onto illustration board and paint it up until I get sick of looking at it. Actually, now that I look back at it, I think the color sketch looks way better than the final painting, as far as characters and colors, so this was a horrible choice to use as an example. Whoops!

Yesterday I finished the first draft of “The Wacktastic Adventures of Funkmaster Rock” (tentative title), so I figured I’d give you the skip on how I’m going to do this.

The book is going to be 32 pages, which is the pretty average length for children’s books. Most of the pages are going to be illustrated as spreads, with the picture extending over two pages. I just wanted to get the story established, so I put it all down and divided it up over the 32 pages. Now I get to the sweet stuff, which is sketching and doing rough art for each page. But the fun part of doing the writing and illustrating together is that I can still play with the text, so while I’m drawing and getting new ideas, I can add whatever I everlovin’ want to the story.

The next step is for me to make thumbnail sketches for each page to figure out how everything is positioned on the page. Then I’ll spread 17 full-sized blank pieces of paper all over my floor and work them all up together. Once I get 17 finished drawings, I’ll bring one or two to a finished painting, and I’ll have a dummy to take around to publishers. Now you know everything I know about children’s books.