a few sketches

Nothing terribly surprising here, give me a pencil and you get a cat eventually.

Or some kind of a flower thing


Or sort of sci fi towers.

It's what happens.

I don't know what else to say about it!

Just a sample

Over the next couple weeks I'll be finishing up quite a lot of illustrations for a project of illustrating a children's book about angels. There will be 10 canvases I'm painting for the inside (not counting the cover, back, etc.) and each canvas has two sides, so there are 20 individual images. I'm done with three canvases now and hope to complete three more by March 1 so I will be almost done for our March 15 deadline. They are fun to do, with similar color palettes and themes -- it's really quite a wonderful idea! It wasn't my idea, but I am happy to be illustrating it. :)

This is why I haven't had a chance to post other new art lately, because I've been very involved with this, but I have other stuff brewing as well...and with winter on the way out, the great outdoors beckon soon!...

A change of pace

I usually just do colorful things but I do have a long history of doodling in notebooks to fall back on when I don't want to make a big colorful mess. I'm trying to do more of this in between other projects. Above is with a soft, thick sort of pencil lead. Cheap ones, of course. Lots of smudges.


I like things that are hiding or veiled, and this started out as a batwing kind of thing like the one in the background on the top sketch. I could do these all day. When I don't have colors, I tend to go with line weirdness and textures, since they kind of seem like colors to me. Certain types of shading or cross hatching...sort of look like colors to me...sort of a synaesthesia thing I guess.
This one is the crowd pleaser. A bird or a butterfly or a fish or a peacock. Aren't we all of those things sometimes?

Just a sneak peek

This is just a rough beginning for something that will be on a page in the new book I am illustrating, "Angels at my Side." It will be a lovely little book for children. The artwork will be lighter than most of my work, with pastel shades and gentle images. It will be out this spring! It will be great for Mother's Day, we think, with a special poem for mothers and lovely springlike imagery and colors. I hope everyone enjoys it! I enjoy the chance to try some different colors and images, but I've always had a few angels in my paintings.

This was a large-ish painting based on an image I saw in an old, old book.


One of my earliest paintings was an angel holding a little dragon.

I'm sure there are more but that's all I can find for now!

More psychedelic visions

I'm going to be very busy for the next few weeks working on a new illustration project that I am very excited about, and before I embark on that here is one more painting of rainbows and strangeness that I did in my down time. Sort of some Eve/Lillith associations here but really I just wanted to do something colorful. In the cold dark winter months where everything is beautifully monochrome, I still do crave color. I am starting to anticipate the return of colorful things emerging from the earth.

Anyway, that is all for today...will be unveiling some of my new illustration work soon!

Winter surrealism

"A Scarlet Wish" is based vaguely on an image in my mind when I hear a song by that title by the Legendary Pink Dots. This was just a quick little monochrome (mostly) thing. I'm going to pretend this has some applicability to Valentine's Day (applicability - is that even a word?) because of the red ribbons.  I will let you decide if it fits or not...but I present it nonetheless!

Valentines on the horizon!

It's been quite a year so far with a lot of family illnesses and trips to the hospital for minor things, after that big pre-Christmas snow storm, but things are hopefully getting back to normal now. And here we are already looking at hearts and shamrocks everywhere in the stores! I really love the white and red and hearts on snow sort of imagery associated with Valentine's Day, even though I've never been into the holiday (I'm much too cranky for things like that).

But because I love snow and hearts, I have a lot of Valentiney art in the vaults! Here's a print of one of them that I have in my Etsy shop. I still have a lot more snowy winter art as well! It's been a good couple of weeks, the Eve Hallows book that I illustrated (By Freda Roberts and Eva Rice) now available on amazon.com, Barnes and Noble online, powells.com and other sites! And we are starting work on another book for which I am the illustrator. More on that as it develops!

Happy 2010 now that I can finally start enjoying it!

Eve Hallows book now available!

This is the culmination of the project I worked for the past six months or so, illustrating this lovely new modern Halloween tale :

Eve Hallows is a whimsical tale of courage, benevolence, and hope. Good witch Eve desires to use her gifts to bring healing and joy to the children of the world. Accompanied by her two enchanted stooges, Niles, the aviate broom and Oliver, the sassy pumpkin, she visits the homebound Kyle and his friends on 'All Hallows Eve' teaching them the lesson that charity brings more magic and opportunity in ones life. Written by Freda Roberts and Eva Rice, Eve Hallows is the first in the many to follow. Published by Mirror/ Page of Wonder Publishing.

Eve Hallows on Amazon

Eve Hallows on Barnes and Noble

You don't have to wait until Halloween to enjoy it! There's full color art on each page. If you do purchase a copy we'd love if you'd write a review on the site from which you ordered it!

Paisley Alchemist

Here is the second in my paisley sorcery series. Series? I didn't mean for it to be a series, but the paisleys keep coming out of things. In this piece, a potion wizard is preparing a concoction in a cosmic landscape, from which flow monochrome paisley forms into a green sky. Strange sigils glow amidst fire hued orbs. I don't know if I'll have more like this but it seemed like a good idea for the moment!

Oh I had something else I was going to write a post about too but I wrote about this instead. I'll get to the other one tomorrow!

New year, new art

My inspiration for the beginning of 2010 is late 1960s/early 1970s psychedelic horror movies that I've been watching lately. Most of them are not nearly as psychedelic as the movie title, the opening credits, the amazing weird soundtrack noises or the promotional materials would have you believe, but they still create an interesting atmosphere.

Blue/green/red color palettes, ominous dark trees and towers, long hair, long dresses, knife-wielding women, and weird pointless squiggly loopy things and colorful blobs. That's where it's at. I just gave these the first titles that leapt into my mind. In this case, it's "Paisley Priestess" and "Mistress of the Purple Tower" for these...ahh but there are many other things I could have called them. Well here they are for your review. Thanks for looking!