I’ve been on an alligator kick lately. I have a huge empty canvas hanging in Ocee’s room waiting for an alligator to appear on it, but I can decide what I want it to look like yet. I’ve got sketches galore but not settled on one, but I have seemed to show up in some other pieces. This one is for our current promo mailer for Illustration For Kids:

One day I’ll decide on “his” but for now I’ll just stare at the white canvas. At least he doesn’t know it’s not supposed to be blank.

Later gators!

I recently designed some stickers for Creative Teaching Press. They are one of my favorite clients to work with because they give me total creative freedom, plus they are all really, really nice and appreciative of the work I do.

This is a piece that appears in April’s issue of The Little Lutheran magazine for kids. It was a nice surprise to see it also made the cover.

I finished up this piece a few days before Ocee was born. It will be fun to look back on projects and remember at what point in my pregnancy I did them. Unfortunately a lot of the memories will be, “Oh, I remember that project, I had to quit in the middle of illustrating that spread to throw up.”

Thanks so much for all your sweet comments on O’Hare! We’re still getting our schedule worked out and this week and I’m easing back into work things but taking it slow. I have some baby bib and baby bedding designs on the calendar this week which I thought were perfect timing!

Here’s a piece I recently completed for a math workbook for Creative Teaching Press. It’s in my found object style.

I recently illustrated a cute book about the journey of a raindrop. This was done in my junk/found object style:

I participated in Cindy Ann Ganaden’s annual ornament swap this year and here’s the ornament I made for the swap. It’s entitled “Ho-oh-oh!”

I illustrated the December cover of Hal Leonard’s Music Express magazine. This is in my found object style that’s completely digital.

As you can see, I was also was the “open act” for Bon Jovi (tee-hee):

A first grader is officially in the house! We made it through kindergarten. After her graduation we put her to bed crying because she wanted to stay in Kindergarten and be with her teacher. I don’t know if she fully realizes that she won’t go to school all summer and when she goes back she’ll have a new teacher and classroom. Hopefully we will be able to gear her up for first grade and she will be as excited to start as she was for Kindergarten.

Over the last week or so we’ve been getting all our end of the year gifts in order which took a lot longer than expected and tried to work them all in between deadlines. Here’s just a few things we did to complete the school year:

We have a lot of fun summer things planned like teaching the the Woog to sew, tie-dye, etc. and we’re bringing Woogie Wednesdays back in full force so be on the lookout for that. For me, I’ll be using my summertime to work on a few projects that have been on my list to start and complete for some time now. They’re going to be good, I promise