Christmas Card 2011, “Sledding Teddy” original watercolor 10 x 8″ Introduction I have been creating my family’s Christmas card for the last twenty-five years. It is a process I learned by doing. In the early years I printed my cards (always black and white back then) with the old tried and true paste-up method. These…
“Liberty’s Child” watercolor on paper 11×14″ Many artists are intimidated by the prospect of creating a portrait of an individual in watercolor. They need not be! Watercolor is a wonderful medium for capturing the ethereal nature of the subject, and very amenable to portraying the subtle changes in coloring that occur in people’s faces. As…
For other posts in this series: part 1 | part two | part three | part four … My experience illustrating children’s books has been a joyful one, though there have been times when it’s tested my mettle. This job is very time and labor-intensive, and you must check your artistic ego at the door….
For other posts in this series: part 1 | part two | part three … After you have completed each page in whatever medium you use (I use pen and ink and watercolor), it’s time to send them off to the art director. The art director will compile your scans of the illustrated pages and…
For part one of this series, click here; for part two, click here … Now comes the magical time when you actually start producing final art for the book. It is a heady time! Some of the euphoria is tempered by all the seemingly nit-picky “rules” illustrators need to follow. As you can imagine, printing…
For part one of this series, click here … Let’s jump ahead and assume you’ve received a positive response from one of your many queries. Now it’s time to begin the actual work of illustrating a story. In my case, I was presented with several manuscripts written by different authors and was allowed to choose…
Welcome to the premiere edition of the new Rural Girl Graphics blog! This is a new feature in association with my new and improved website, ruralgirlgraphics.com. For this first series of the blog, I thought I’d write about my experience as a children’s book illustrator. First I’d like to say that illustrating kids’ books had…
