Friday, January 01, 2016

This Blog is Retired

Perhaps it's sad to say, but all great things must come to an end… for the time being. Until I find another way of updating regularly that makes sense and makes viewers happy, I won't be posting here. When I do, I will create a new blog at my website and post a link here. In the meantime, please do enjoy my blog archive here. Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

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

Wednesday, December 02, 2015

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 SantatSusie Ghahremani, J. Otto Semibold, and Jamie Zollars!!  (forgive me other children's book peeps, the list is SO LONG I may have missed you).

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

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!

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

7th Annual Picture Book Idea Month — PiBoIdMo 2015

I have been SLACKING… how can my SECOND blog post of the year be in late October?! I guess it doesn't help that I've have a mysterious illness for almost 2 months… but thankfully that's getting better and I almost feel like a person again (although I still have no idea what it was/is).

It's harvest time for group projects and creative challenges! PiBoIdMo 2015, here I come!

Head over to Taralazar.com to find out more about PiBoIdMo. This will be my SIXTH year participating (and PiBoIdMo's 7th year). 

I'm really looking forward to the month-long guest blog posts, inspiration, and support that PiBoIdMo provides.

I finally started writing last year… and while I've made some progress, I'm still not where I'd like it to be—so, as usual, #PiBoIdMo is a reminder (and a good kick-in-the-pants) to revisit my collected ideas and start WRITING… you know, to go along with all my artwork. I'll just say it: I'm tired of waiting around for someone else's story—time to create my own stories.

I'm so excited, I've started already. (…just a minute ago…idea #1 was recorded for posterity…I think I feel another idea coming on…this is what it's all about)



Monday, July 13, 2015

My New Website is Up and Running!

I finally got my new website up… as is the case with a lot of websites, there are things I really like and things that are not-so-great, but it's clean and organized and pretty easy to work with and update. Now I just need to work on some new stuff to update it with!

Monday, December 01, 2014

PiBoIdMo 2014 - 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 fifth year of participating in Picture Book Idea Month (#PiBoIdMo) was another success!! It's always a wonderful challenge… I don't know if it's because so many others are working right along with me and our combined motivation keeps us going or what, but it works… every year for me!

The best part, after 5 years of participating in generating ideas… I've finally started writing! Well, I actually started before PiBoIdMo, (and I've started several projects in the past, but I'm not counting those, because I never finished any of them!), but it was a real confidence booster overall—actually writing something, being happy with it, working through ideas and story structure, getting it critiqued (by friends and an editor!)… it's a whole new avenue for me and I'm super-excited to keep going! On to revisions!!

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