Plein Air paintings exhibit on Tuesday, November 3

This summer I actually painted outside, for an entire afternoon! It was the first annual Plein Air at Beaver Farm, an all-day marathon of outdoor landscape painting to benefit Camphill Special School’s Transition Program, organized by my wonderful and talented friend Nancy Bea Miller, who is a painter and parent of a son who attends the Camphill School. About forty area painters participated, and most of them are fine artists who came with their French easels and field boxes and created gorgeous paintings over the course of the day. It was very cool to look across the beautiful farmland and to see here a painter, there a painter, everywhere a painter, painter.

I found a lovely little shaded spot next to a cheerful stream, and sat in a folding camp chair with my paper and palette balanced on my lap. (Though I took along a brand new portable easel, it ended up staying in its nice zipped holder all day.) I painted four teeny-tiny pictures (2.5 by 3.5 inches -- the 'aceo' size that I guess is a new trend for creating art to swap and/or sell). I painted strictly from observation, and it was pretty difficult to paint fast enough to capture this little dryad getting her feet muddy in the stream.


So on Tuesday there is an exhibit and sale of the works created that day at the Rosenfeld Gallery here in Philadelphia. I saw the work this afternoon when I dropped off my little tinies, and it's really a stunning array of gorgeous and varied art, all for sale, and all with at least a percentage of the sale going to Camphill Special School. Stop by if you happen to be in the zip code (which is 19106, btw)!

Art Nouveau of long ago, revisited

I just finished the art for the t-shirt for this year's RSCMA King's College Course, which is the wonderful choir camp I go to, almost every year, in Wilkes-Barre. (And I finished the art just in time, too, because camp starts on Monday.) I started with an image from my Art Nouveau Abstract Designs book (published in, gasp, 1983). Here's the picture from the book.



I reworked the proportions in order to allow for type and added some music notes for a more choir-like picture. And then I colored it! Since the Art Nouveau book is all black line work, it was really fun to turn the image into a colored version. This is watercolor, a bit of inkline (to serve as the leading in the 'stained glass'), and then lots of colored pencil. Here's the finished art.

You can see the actual t-shirt design, with the type in place, at the King's Course cafepress shop. And tomorrow I'll be making a bunch of t-shirts and tote bags here in the studio (via my fabulous heat press) to take with me to camp on Monday! Tra la!

Colin Thompson's marvelous art: now appearing...

...on all of my pieces o' tech.
I am such a fan, you know? Colin Thompson is one of my favorite illustrators, and his "Bookshelf" picture is one of my very favorites. -- I've had a print of it stuck on the side of my studio bookshelf for ages.
But then I found the Bookshelf picture appearing as a selection on the Gelaskins website! (Where there are also a whole lot of other very very cool images from which to choose. Hieronymus Bosch featured on top of your laptop? Yessss.) After noticing how I was drooling over it, my sister went ahead and bought me the version that goes on my little mini computer. (Isn't she the thoughtful one?) Here it is:

(She got the "Underworld" typewriter image for her ipod, which looks quite nifty as well.)

My now-embellished mini computer was so cool to look at, and made me so happy, that I found I was impelled to acquire more. So I did.
So now my ipod and my laptop look equally cool and very very bookish. (You can see much better pictures of each type of hardware decked out with their gelaskins at the company website, but I just felt I needed to share my own pix of my own stuff...)
Here's my ipod:


Here's my laptop, which I generally despise because it runs the terrible, awful Windows Vista software which is slow and annoying in almost every way, but for which I now feel new fondness, because of what it's wearing. Turns out clothing can make the, uh, machine, after all.

I am so happy.

It's a bird! It's a plane! IT'S SUP... nah, it's just a coloring book...

That is, I mean: Woohoo! It's a COLORING BOOK!!
Announcing Silly Pictures to Color! -- a book which needs no further explanation. Silly. Pictures. To Color. It's all there.
But just in case you're feeling more need-to-know-y than usual, here's the back cover with even more incredibly obvious information.

Further stating the obvious, I'm excited indeed (YES!! EXCITED!!) about having made this book o' mine to send out into the world, where I hope it will fall, many times, into countless eager hands clutching markers (colored pencils also welcome.)

Check it out and let me know what you think. I'm almost finished with another one, a coloring book with all/some/okay, most of the scenes from my extremely densely pictured polar bear bench, CHillie.

Chestnut Hill Book Festival

Meet Chester T. Bookly (created by me), who is the official mascot for the upcoming Chestnut Hill Book Festival on July 10, 11, and 12.

Here's a look at a promotional bookmark which has a bit more info about all the cool stuff that will happen as part of the event. I'll be there, doing a signing, selling books, and possibly participating in a panel about writing for children. You can visit www.chestnuthillpa.com for more info (but give it a little time, as they don't have anything posted just yet...)

What I Drew in Church This Week: Call Your Mom

One of those imperative holidays. If you called her, hope she picked up the phone....

RGB vs CMYK: battle for the better blue

First picture is RGB, second one is converted to CMYK, with the blue sky tweaked a bit to try to get closer to the original blue (the RGB to CMYK conversion made the sky almost gray.) I've had to convert RGB to CMYK a few times before when submitting art digitally, but wow -- I never noticed such a marked difference in color before. Seems as if CMYK just doesn't care much for ultramarine blue. See how gray the shadows on the tablecloth are? That was the sky, too, before some major tweakage. Anyway, if I hadn't seen the RGB version (and hadn't painted the original), I guess the CMYK version would look just fine (post-tweak) to me.
The real question is just what kind of news is that glass of milk getting ready to spill?
I think it's a bit more sensational than "Dinner is served."