12.30.2009

Hannah Mueller

For Christmas, my wife and daughter totally surprised me with a Wacom tablet. I'm not (and probably never will be) ready to completely abandon traditional ink and paper, but I AM really impressed with the newfound ability to create line variation in a digital drawing. Many more experiments, and a hopefully a more uplifting New Years posting soon!

PS I do wish we'd get some real snow out here soon though...

12.22.2009

McCabe Memorial Fundraiser

The xc ski community is pooling its resources in order to purchase two paintings by my late friend, Sean McCabe. Even better than the obvious financial contribution is the fact that the paintings will be given to Sean's two young daughters - in memory of their dad. The fundraiser continues through January 15th at www.fasterskier.com.

12.14.2009

Happy Holidays!


My daughter and I teamed up for our second annual Christmas card print. She drew/designed/printed it. I cut the block and provided assitance/heavy hands-on consultation with the printing. So much fun, and she loves it too :)

12.11.2009

Wonder Schools! Part 2

Busy of late, but thanks and recognition to several school/festival visits in October and November is LONG over due! To start, in mid-October I attended my second Humbolt County Authors Festival. In a nutshell...

....I tagged along with a gallery tour at the Morris Graves Museum of Art and did a short illustrator talk about my work from Dog Diaries...

...I visited Washington Elementary and Arcata Christain Academy...

...made guest appearance on the cable access t.v. program "Homework Helpers"...

...and pretty much basked in the joyful glory of the "school visit" part of my job! Check out these great projects by the students at Arcata Christian. Above: construction paper sloths and cheetahs ala Slow Days, Fast Friends.

On the fast/slow theme as well, the teachers crafted this great creative writing excercise. "I want to slow down when... I like to go fast when..." PLUS, they brought in an art component as the kids each painted sunsets!

Kids also wrote and illustrated their very own Dog Diaries...

...and built their own mosters ala Octavius Bloom and the House of Doom.

As usual, I did some drawing to compliment my talking. Here is the Alligator, Bear, Crocodile for the ABC Pre-schoolers. Yup, alligators and crocodiles are pretty similar, but that's what they wanted :)

As a special treat at lunch, we had Slow Days, Fast Friends cake. So cool!

Look at that CAKE!

The final morning is a big booksale at the beautiful Humbolt County Library.

I shared a table with the amazingly talented writer, illustrator, singer Bruce Hale...

...and the entire 3 days with the rest of these incredible folks. Larry Dane Brimner, Shirley Climo, and Mathew Gollub are pictured in the foreground here.

Finally, on Nov. 4-5 I visited 3 different schools and libraries in the Sno-Isle Library System as a part of their annual Children's Book Week. Great, inquisitve kids in all three places...

...plus there was more CAKE! Otis the otter, featured here, is one of the many drawings that I did last spring for the Sno-Isle Kids Library Homepage. Cheers!