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.

This is probably the last post I’ll do on this piece for awhile – for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I don’t like it. The composition doesn’t work, and I’m too taken by my other projects to really care a lot about this one right now. So here are some character studies I did of some real sassy seagulls. If you live somewhere that’s landlocked and have never met one, seagulls fall somewhere on the International Sass Scale (ISS) between Theo Huxtable and Harriet Winslow. I do like these, so maybe after I finish the coonskin cap piece I can use them.

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!