Sarah's Sketches

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!

I spotted some blank board books at the art store and thought it would be fun to write a book for my daughter for a Christmas present. It's a sturdy book, but since the pages have a papery surface, rather than the smooth surface most board books have, I thought I'd better make the contents as toddler-proof as possible and used pen and ink. (Can you tell I inked the last page first as a test page?) Also, happily, it seems my virusy art is salvageable! Hurrah! Thank you Robert for helping us run some scans! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday. Here's the rest of the book...

Just kidding on the vs. but someone should draw that! Maybe me. We'll see. Hey look two posts in one month! Yay! Maybe this has something to do with moving my studio downstairs? Both of these were drawn while hanging out with my 1 1/2 year old daughter. She was anxious to help, so I had to be quick flipping my sketchbook to "her" drawing page whenever she nabbed the pencil. Unless something goes awry, I WILL have another post before Christmas. It's half done. Stay tuned. :)

Just a little sketch to check and see that the computer is up and running after a major virus attack. So long all my digital art from the past three years! Let this be a lesson to me to burn DVDs of everything, not just have backup drives. I travelled to Denmark in October to teach character design for a week at the wonderful Animation Workshop . I had a great time; the students were all exceptionally talented and the staff very welcoming. Not to mention Denmark is a beautiful country and a mecca for yummy food, it was a treat to visit. I've been doing a lot of writing these past few months, and now that I've got a new studio space set up, I hope to get some more art done as well. If I don't post again before Christmas, I hope everyone has a great holiday. :)

I've long wanted to do some art for my daughter's room (who as I type this, I can hear has woken up from her nap and is peeping around in her crib...) and like most wanting to do art for family members, I always have trouble getting started. This, though, is based on the print of Mucha's Night Sky that is hanging in our daughter's room, but instead features our little lady and a bunny... or as she would call it, a"bun." Thanks again for all the kind and thoughtful responses to my last post. It has been encouraging. I know I have not posted much recently, but I have been busy doing some freelance design I was not free to share and a lot of writing. I've got two writing projects nearly complete. What the next step is for the books I'm not sure, but they will need cover art, so stay tuned for that. My e-mail is operational again, but I hope to set up a different address soon. And thank you, of course, for stopping by.

So... an update. About a month ago I waved the white flag on my graphic novel. Being a full-time mom doesn't leave much time for drawing and anyone who's ever worked on a comic knows that creating a comic is very time intensive. Despite working on the book whenever I had a spare moment, I was just getting further and further behind schedule and more and more frustrated. When I realized it was going to take me over a DECADE to finish at the slow pace I'd gotten to, I knew it was time to give up. I will of course continue to post new art here on the blog, hopefully a little more frequently. This painting is of my newest little nephew (yay!). I also apologize for my over full e-mail inbox that has been rejecting mail this past month. I'll be posting a new artist address as soon as I get it set up.

That lucky little baby has a lot of presents.

Here are a couple (non sequential) pages from my graphic novel. I left out the dialogue because... well... I'm not about to spoil the story, but I left the bubbles in because they are an important part of the composition. Happy Friday.

This is for the Drawergeeks topic, Goths. It needs some polish it probably won't get, but I was happy that it only took me about an hour to do. I'm even happier that I have something to contribute to Drawergeeks this time round. I've missed some great topics. Taking care of my daughter eats up a lot of drawing time and pretty much obliterates blogging and e-mail time (although I can't think of a more delightful distraction.) However, I am still working on my graphic novel and although slow going, progress is happening. Next up, blogwise, is new graphic novel art, so stay tuned.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Years. Two of my cousins also had babies in 2008, this sketch of our little ones was a Christmas present for them.

I don't usually take on much commission work these days, but I made an exception for Travis Chasez , who wanted to create a tattoo for his wife based somewhat on this old post. Hope everyone had a turkeylicious Thanksgiving!

When I told Stephen about the current drawergeeks topic, witch, he started thinking about other genres of witches. As in "what would a modern day storybook witch look like?" This train of thought made me think about how we live in Texas... so here's a western witch. I imagine she has vicious flying farm animals as minions.

A big thank you to those of you still checking the blog. I'm working on that mom/artist balance. We've been watching The Tudors and it inspired me to paint the unfortunate Anne.

Yay! Getting a post up! The top sketch reminded me of Miss Havisham, so I added the veil. I'm not a huge Dickens fan, but I am a huge Miss Havisham fan. She's crazy in all the best ways. As for my graphic novel, below are colors from one of the opening sequences. I'll be posting more character designs soon. I'm currently working on a font for the book. Anyone out there ever successfully create a font for comic purposes? Any tips? I found this interesting tutorial here.

My Grandma.

So with a teeny baby you can't exactly go dancing or to concerts or to movies, so Stephen and I have instead been running around the magical land of Warcraft. Whoo! So if you ever see a little gnome mage and human rogue kicking some bad guy butt, buff us! And hey, check out my buddy Eric Henze's blog. He worked on WOW. Also, check out Michelle Gorski's blog, who inspired me to do this post, with her post . Aaaand, Flight 5 is out! YEAH! Hope you enjoy my story "The Changeling" and also all the other super fun stories in it. Be sure to take a peek at the preview . And lastly, here's a quick sketch of Hellboy for drawergeeks . Go surliness!