Thursday, June 28, 2012

NEW PROJECT: Adoption E-Book- "Joy"

I am pleased to announce that I have started working on illustrations for an e-book project with author Susan Longley.

The book, titled "Joy," is a story about adoption that has a great message, described by the author as being "about the spiritual connection between adopted children and their forever family." Since the author is self-publishing, she has started a campaign to help raise money to fund this project so she can move forward spreading the wonderful message of this book.

Visit this link for more information about this book and how you can contribute to the campaign.

I can't wait to share these illustrations with you all soon!

Sunday, June 24, 2012

A Little Lamb and a Lesson in Animal Ages

Every Sunday, I have the great blessing of teaching a class of five- and six-year-olds at my church. Today, our lesson was about how Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd, so I decided to draw a picture of a cute little lamb for the kids to take home with them to help them remember what they learned at church today. I sure love those cute little lambs I get to teach every week!

Lesson Learned: When drawing baby animals, be aware of proportions. Make sure you have accurate reference of the baby animal or your illustration may end up looking more like a miniature animal than a baby animal.  Just like human babies, baby animals have a very different head-to-body size ratio. To keep your baby animal characters looking young, make the head bigger, eyes and ears larger and torso shorter than those of a grown animal. For sheep and other hoofed animals, make the legs skinnier and the coat shorter and softer looking than that of its adult counterpart. Add sweetness to your character by emphasizing eyelashes and hinting at a smile in the character's expression.