Illustration Friday - HEART

I did some brainstorming and word association for Heart and came up with this.  Can you hear the music from the piano? 

Heart and soul, I fell in love with you; heart and soul, the way a fool would do; madly . . . 

MUSE

This will be my submission for the SCBWI newsletter. Word prompt is MUSE.

     I had some fun starting this one. I got out my sculpey clay and created a little human figure to help me with positioning.  It did help a little, but mostly it got me interested in doing more sculpture. I had a lot of fun!

Here's one of the photos I took.  

Dress-up

This piece has come a long way.  It started in 2012 in my Sketch-a-day sketchbook. I was just starting to try my hand at illustration. I was learning to draw from my imagination, sketch, and work out concepts.  I had found Illustration Friday and was doing the weekly word prompts but not posting. The IF word of the week was INTENTION. Here's what my sketchbook page looked like:

 The next year Illustration Friday posted the prompt PROTEST. I took this idea and ended up with this, which I posted in 2013:

I always liked this idea and with a couple more years of practice under my belt, I redid it again which is the image I posted today.  Notice, I kept the same cat. 

Who knows? - in a couple more years I may rework it yet again!

Illustration Friday - POINTY

 I had two paintings of my daughter in progress at the same time, and finished them this week within a day of each other.  This one fits nicely into the IF word of the week - POINTY (good timing). Louisa wearing a pointy witch's hat.

Preparing for Prom

     Just finished this 20 x 24 oil portrait of my daughter.  I worked from a photo that I took in 2014. I've been working a lot on my illustrations and haven't done much painting this year so I was feeling like I needed to stretch a few of those muscles. I took a few photos of my process to share.

 

APRIL in August

April Showers Bring . . . Fishes 

I'm entering this in a calendar contest for the SCBWI conference in September. Any member can illustrate a month and if they win it will appear in a printed calendar for the Northern Ohio Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Fingers are crossed.
     It is done almost entirely digitally except for the preliminary sketch which I dropped into Corel Painter.  I can't imagine giving up the good old pencil for sketching out ideas. Originally the background was a house but I didn't think it had the visual impact that this background has. That's what I love about working digitally. You can change your mind in a very big way without starting completely over.

Here's the little seed for the idea that started in my sketchbook.

Update: I won the contest with the most votes! Yay! My image was used for the month of September!