Last week, the kids book I illustrated – My Name is Elizabeth - was named one of the New York Times Notable Children’s Books of 2011.

Hey, so I have this two-page comic about Tweedledum & Tweedledee in this new Nursery Rhymes Comics Anthology coming out this fall (First, Second).

I couldn’t have picked a more fun nursery rhyme for me to do. So thanks to Chris Duffy (editor) for picking it for me.

There are so many great artists in this book like Laura Park, Mike Mignola, Richard Thompson, Vera Brosgol, Craig Thompson, Scott C., and Kate Beaton that I won’t even bother mentioning any of their names.

Check it out, it will be bookstores everywhere… or order it here on Amazon.

24 pages | Kids Can Press |Squarebound | Buy at Amazon

New York Times Notable Book of 2011

My Name is Elizabeth is a book about a girl who doesn’t like when people mess with her name. The book was written by Annika Dunklee and illustrated by me.

Here are a few photos I took while painting the book in my apartment. These pages were painted with gouache and ink while listening This American Life.

Finally, here’s what my table looked like while working on the book…

Buy the book on Amazon.

PRESS
New York Times Notable Book of 2011
Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
New York Times Sunday Book Review
Globe & Mail
Chicago Tribune
Chapters / Indigo
Toronto Star
School Library Journal

More books…

Here’s a splash page I did yesterday. This stuff is all pretty standard – there’s nothing really revolutionary about the way I work. But here you go, anyway.

First I start with a couple coloured pencils. Usually light blue, green then red – getting progressively darker as I sculpt the image and block the image.

Then I ink. I use a dip pen – the Japanese G-nib exclusively. It’s much more forgiving than the traditional Hunt 102 nib for a guy like me. I use FW (Daler Rowney) black *and* white inks. The white inks are amazingly opaque and besides white gouache or Photoshop, it’s the most opaque thing I’ve found.

A lot of people say they can get the same line and effect from using a Wacom tablet on the computer, but I can’t, so I still ink everything. And every moment I spend *not* working on the computer is wonderful.

Then I scan and clean up the image in Photoshop. There were two big ink spills on this page and lots of little scuffs. Everything is scanned at 600dpi grayscale and worked from there.

I usually add overlays in Photoshop with a default drybrush. Often I will do a manual overlay with a lightbox and a real brush. But this image was mostly done – I already had the values keyed in and I didn’t need a lot of expression or movement in the mid-tones, so I went straight to the computer.

Later, I will batch-convert both layers on all the finished pages into 1200dpi bitmaps to send to the publisher. I made a Photoshop Action for this on my last book and it saved me about 3 weeks of work.

This page is for a new book, Jinchalo – which will be out later this year.

One of my older illustrations is now the cover of a new book by Dutch researcher, Lannie Ligthart.

Doing a slight design update for the Ojingogo Swedish edition. Here’s a sketch for an idea for integrating the UPC code into the back design of the book…

Swedish edition is released September, 2009 at the Gothenburg Book Fair with Ordbilder Media.

Here are some birds I drew last week-end.

Book News:

What else? I just finished teaching my journalism class this year – so I haven’t had time to draw much of anything in the last couple months. I’m wrapping up marking – and it looks like the class is done for good – so I’m excited to hit the drafting table again this week…