Sarah's Sketches

One last post for the year. These two are from a story I've been writing.

Hey it's still Monday, right? I'm losing track of what day of the week it is. I love that about the holidays. Anyway, here are more comic roughs ! For those of you who have been reading along, I'm pretty fond of this scene. Next week's is really fun too. Happy last remnants of 2010!

Last year, I wrote a story for my daughter as a Christmas present. I thought it would be fun to do the same thing this year. I even managed to paint a handful of pages (above) before the Christmas rush got the better of me. You can read a full size version here. Hope everyone has a great holiday!

Here's a preview of something I've been working on for the past week or so (and am still working on.) More will be coming soon. And also, here is sequence 18 of The Wellington Division!

New sequence is up! Back to the asylum...

More story. Elsie is so patient.

Laura puts it best.

No comic post this week as I just finished packing for a trip and now I am too sleepy/delirious to organize htmls. Instead, here are designs for the sprite crew from last week's sequence 15. You can click on either image for a slightly bigger version of the whole line-up. I'll be back in December. :)

It was nice today to have a drawing already scanned and ready for a bit of paint.

More comic roughs ! Eraser bits and all. :)

So thanks to the new stats on blogger, I discovered that for a long while this old Pippi Longstocking drawing was my top post. I suspected it was a result of Halloween costume google image searching, and since now in November, Pippi is abandoned, I guess that was true. But it all made me think of how much I love Pippi and drawing Pippi twice has to be better than drawing Pippi once. Anyway, so here is Pippi again. I suppose this is for all of you Pippi's-to-be in 2011.

This one's just another little Tearse/Tyler sequence . It's so teeny, I nearly tacked it onto last week's. At the end of this sequence there is a reveal of a building and let me just say, the design of it is wrong wrong wrong. I did put some thought into location designs in these roughs, but in general, I pretty much went with the first thing that popped into my head and was more interested in staging/story- thinking I'd fix designs that needed fixing when I did final art. So when you see that building, ignore the lame fairy-tale castle look of it. Instead, think intimidating, cold, fortress-type place. Tyler should be scared!

It was fun using real ink and paints again, testing out a look. Cold press watercolor paper makes for some woogly lines though... I'll try hot press next time.

Sequence Thirteen! Tearse has a heartwarming chat with his lovable old Dad. So Google Reader is awesome. Shame on me for never bothering to figure it out before now. I spent the kid's nap time last Thursday adding all the wonderful blogs I am inspired by but hardly ever have the chance to check, and now all I have to do is open Google Reader! Hooray! Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween. My little frog and cat-princess did. :)

My daughter wanted to be in the drawing too. :)

More graphic novel roughs ! Almost didn't post this tonight. We were busy moving furniture around the house all day and had both computers unplugged.

Sequence 11 ; In which Tearse decides what to do with (translation; how to get rid of) the smallest island intruder.

I tweaked the anthology links on my stories page. I have now posted my Fish story from Fablewood in it's entirety! The Flight stories also now link to the preview pages of those stories on Flight's website and I've put up two preview pages for Above , a story found in the yet-to-be (but soon will be!) released Parable anthology. I don't intend to do Fablewood a disservice by posting my whole story. So please go check out this really great anthology of short stories. You can find it here on Amazon. Also! After some thought about the logistics of posting my Wellington Division roughs, I've decided I'll post a new sequence (usually about seven-ten pages) every Monday. If you've read the story so far and you find it somewhat charming, and you are often bored on Mondays, and you have friends that might also find it somewhat charming and be bored on Mondays, spread the word! :)

I know, all caps and so many exclamation marks. It's like I'm yelling at you. But I am! Because hurrah! A shiny new blog design! And a shiny new website design! And best of all, I've decided to share the entire complete sketched version of my six part graphic novel, with the bonus of thirty painted pages! As of now, book one of the Wellington Division is up! The other five volumes are ready to roll, it's just a matter of building the web pages and replacing my illegible handwritten text with fonts. I've never hosted something so massive, so hopefully this will not crash my site. If it does, bear with me and I'll figure something out. I would love to finish the final art for the Wellington Division, (there are so many sequences I was looking forward to painting...) But right now is not the time and it makes me happy to share the story, rather than shelve it. :) Please note that along with the new website, I also have a new e-mail address.

Several months ago, one of my daughter's favorite things to say was "apricot pop" and so here is a drawing of apricot pop, whatever that might be. Also, the exciting something I mentioned a few posts back is nearly ready.

More forgotten art! These two were drawn this year. I never posted them because I planned to paint them and then was distracted by other projects.

So I was going through some old files from last year and found this painting. I hardly remember painting her and I don't remember why I didn't post her. Maybe I didn't post her because she's unfinished and I thought I'd go back and finish her sometime. Or maybe I didn't post her because she kind of has a crazy eye. Anyway, nuts to finishing things and nuts to crazy eyes, I'm posting her now! And the exciting something for the blog/website is still in the works...

Something EXCITING is coming to my website and blog... So exciting it kept me up all Friday night thinking about how I was going to pull it off. Might be a few more weeks out, but stay tuned. Yay!

This is a sketch of Zaria Tourmaline, a character from Victoria Hanley's wonderful book Violet Wings . Ms. Hanley is one of my latest favorite library discoveries. Some other good reads in the young adult fiction section are Shannon Hale's Books of Bayern and Ursula K. Le Guin's Annals of the Western Shore . I particularly loved Powers .

I've been doing more writing than drawing lately. Here's a sketch of the two main characters from a recent story. I colored it with my daughter on my lap, while she looked at this awesome site for kids. And while I'm mentioning sites, go look at my amazing sister Laura's art blog .

I had a little boy last week. Now we are a family of four! These sketches are for his bedroom. The neat border texture can be found here .

This girl does not look pleased that she has a mug of tea, but it reminds me that there is a shiny electric kettle in my kitchen I should go make use of.

If anyone was curious, my daughter liked her Christmas book... up until the fictional her gave the very special hat back to bear, then there was a great deal of "No! Hat back on head! Hat back on head!" So I suppose if she really does find someone else's hat, things will go differently. Not sure what this lady is up to, surely some fine fighting, roller skating and flying about!