Illustration Friday: UNICORN

My favorite topic EVER is this week's Illustration Friday theme: UNICORN! Okay, I have quite a few, so I'm going to share them all with you here—and don't forget to check out and 'like' your favorites on my instagram account: mb.illustration!

A gift for a friend… back in the mid-1990s, I drew a lot of unicorns like this.
1999. Colored Pencil & Ink.

The Spanish Unicorn… the one that started me on this project of Unicorns of the World.
1998. Colored Pencil

Detail… I was still 'discovering' colored pencil back then, as you can see, I was having fun.
*didn't have a great scanner or auto-merge in Photoshop back then either… so all my images of this one are fairly poor.

The Caribbean Unicorn (I call them Licorne Caraïbes)
1999. Colored Pencil

Ki-lin, the Chinese Unicorn… or one of them.
1999. Colored Pencil

An African unicorn of the Serengeti (Saamoja Upangatiga).
1999. Colored Pencil

The Volcano Unicorn of the Pacific Rim of Fire… Lae-Hao-Kela
1999. Colored Pencil

The Amazonian Unicorn, Unchifre.
1999. Colored Pencil

  

The Japanese Unicorn: Kirin
1999. Colored Pencil

The Arctic Unicorn, Yksisarvinen.
1999. Colored Pencil

  

Another African Unicorn… the Saharan.
2000. Colored Pencil

One more African Unicorn, the Madagascan Unicorn.
2000. Colored Pencil

  

Inspired by Illustration Friday itself: Smitten
#feartheunicorn

Giant Robot 2's Eleventh Annual Post-It Show

Hello my long-wondering-what-I'm-up-to blog followers! Let's just say my 2014/15 years have been a time of introspection and exploration. I've been taking workshops, webinars, and online classes. I've been taking trips and attending conferences. Basically, soaking up a bunch of knowledge and being inspired a whole lot.

And I've been creating. I've continued to experiment with my brush-pen patterns and designs. I've even started doing some representational experiments. I have an exciting new personal project focusing on just that, I'm hoping to get it started in early 2016.

In the meantime, I'm very excited to announce I was invited to participate in Giant Robot's Post-It Show Eleven! The show opens at the LA gallery on Dec 5th, 2015 (check for show news here). Here's a preview of the pieces I submitted to the show:

15 post-its submitted 

"7 of 15"

Some interesting bits about the show this year: All artwork is completed on actual Post-it notes. All Post-it's are $25 (50% goes to the artist). Over 450 artists are confirmed for this year's show — including Dan Santat, Susie Ghahremani, J. Otto Semibold, and Jamie Zollars!!  (forgive me other children's book peeps, the list is SO LONG I may have missed you).

PiBoIdMo 2015 - Winner!

I do solemnly swear that I have faithfully

executed the PiBoIdMo 30-ideas-in-30-days challenge,

and will, to the best of my ability, parlay my ideas

into picture book manuscripts.

Wow! My sixth year of participating in Picture Book Idea Month (#PiBoIdMo) was a success!! (even if I was delayed by visiting family for the holidays)

It's always a wonderful challenge… and I'm looking forward to continuing my writing experiments with these ideas. That's been a slow, slow process for me, but definitely something I'll be concentrating on in 2016!

Congrats to all the other winners as well—it's a long haul, but WE MADE IT!