Maggie in love with the world

It's safe now to post this commission I finished a few weeks ago, which was a lot of fun. I'm starting to feel looser and looser with composition and painting. This is called "The Flying Object" or "Maggie in love with the world"


zoom:


You can also view this and some other new work/sketches on my newly designed website!

bits and pieces

So I can't wait to share the most recent commission I've been working on this past week, but unfortunately it is still in the top secret stage. Until then, I will share some snippets of my color/texture planning for my final manuscript illustrations. I've been fooling around with patterns and printing them using a lithographic process which yields a somewhat inconsistent product.



The inconsistency can be a wonderful thing and also a very annoying thing. So for now, I'm just playing at peicing together my favorite parts.




More on this in the coming weeks...for now I'll leave you with some photos from Christopher's garden:

I love yellow

A new etching inspired by the loads of pollen that can be seen in a pond or lake in the spring time. Finally finished this up...just in time for summer.

Goats and Flowers

What a busy, busy time of traveling, friends, ideas and life changes! For the last two weeks I've been on the Cape, in Boston, on the Cape again, in Boston again and now finally back home with plenty to do.

While up in Danvers, a trip to a little barn with chickens and goats resulted in more goat etchings:

The top one, named, "Goat in the Snow" is a tribute to friend Emily Pettit, whose poem of the same name inspired the image. I gave her this print as thanks for taking care of my little garden while I was bouncing around. How nice to come home to my tiny yard lush with life!

All These Things are Good...

Life has been busy and full since I last wrote. Some of the things I have been doing since then are:

Printing in a barn,

planting things in my own yard for the first time in my life,

designing books,

making books,

representing Brave Men Press at the AWP conference in Denver:

and speaking on a panel on bookmaking at the Chapbook Festival in NY:

All these things are good...

except that in the midst of all this we also lost Christopher, the fluffy love of our lives, to a terminal kitty disease.

The only thing to do now is to keep moving forward with this little project to remember him the way he was:

Sweet, Sweet Color Separation ~or~ A World of Orange and Green

In my search for color inspiration for an ongoing personal dummy project- I have inadvertently found myself drawn to several old books that use just two colors (orange and green), plus black.

I found this old early reader book in a used bookstore last week. What an unassuming treasure:


There are so many reasons I love this title page:


Why is this cat so tiny? I love it!:

Another one that I've been looking at is an old favorite, No More Monsters for Me!, with the subtly stunning illustrations by Marc Simont:



The gesture of this little girl makes this one of my all time favorite illustrations:

I also found this old copy of short stories by one of my favorite russians, with a cover by Milton Glaser. Maybe I was drawn to it for the color:



I'm not quite ready to post what all this inspiration has led to. Some solid ideas that I hope to have presentable soon. Farewell for now from my little orange and green filled studio!

Predicting the Weather

I just finished up this illustration for the cover of the book, How to Predict the Weather by Aaron Burch (Keyhole Press). This shows the full illustration which I completed as an etching. I was also asked to send samples of hand-written fonts to complement the "look" of the image. I had never done this before, but it was kind of fun (although my real life handwriting is awful!)


Anyway, they ended up using one of my handwritten fonts for the cover and I was thrilled to receive an email last night showing me the final layout of the cover:



I am so excited about how this came out and I can't wait to see it in print with it's beautiful matte finish!

Keyhole recently became an imprint of Dzanc Books, and you can read more about this and other releases on their news website.