I was recently the happy recipient of a wonderful book, John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal. This incredibly beautiful book displays the artist’s charcoal portraits with stunning clarity and detail. I was so taken with these masterful portraits that I decided to try my hand at replicating some of them myself. Sargent was an absolutely…
Easter greetings from Ruralgirlgraphics.com! Here at the Upstairs Studio, our hopes are rising on this Easter holiday. We wish you a rebirth of hope in your lives as well. With the coming of spring, the earth seems young again. This tends to give us a “spring” in our step and a lightness in our heart….
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…
