I had the opportunity to participate in a fantastic SCBWI workshop for local illustrators recently, which involved illustrating a scene from a sample manuscript. The final critique was today and I had a lot of fun on both the concepts and the final piece.

The subject matter was pretty different from my usual work so it was a nice challenge to branch out. I think I kind of identified with the kids in this story since I loved both dinosaurs and outer space when I was a kid (and really, still do).

The theme for this month’s challenge over at AnthroCommunity on DA is April Showers. Since I love rain, I had to do an illustration for this!

This is a piece I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but just didn’t have the emotional strength to start it until recently. 

Those of you who have been following my art for a long time are probably familiar with the pomeranian who pops up everywhere. That was my dog, Sambu, and he unfortunately passed away last summer, after a wonderful 15 years.

Losing him was incredibly painful for me, but I’ll always treasure the wonderful memories I have of him, and I’m glad I was finally able to sit down and create this piece of art to commemorate him.

I miss you Sambu. You were the best friend I could ever ask for.

I know Valentine’s Day is over, but I didn’t get a chance to finish this in time since I’ve been pretty busy with work. 

I’ve been doodling this little mouse a lot. I don’t have a name for him yet but I have fun drawing him.

I saw the last theme over at The Mutant Zoo was peacock + tiger and thought that would make for a fun illustration!

He looks so dainty with his little head feathers.

Here’s more of that fox! I wanted to do some illustrations of the Aesop’s Fable The Fox and the Grapes to play around with some illustration techniques and composition.

My fiance and I started watching Merlin recently, and have already blown through the first two seasons. It’s a pretty entertaining show. I felt like scribbling up some fanart.

My cat, Athena, has this phase she goes through almost every night lately, where she is spontaneously unable to get comfortable and sleep. Her solution is to try every possible sleeping position and location (including my face) which generally takes anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Sometimes when I think she has finally gone back to sleep, she will awaken yet again, ready to wreck more havoc on my sleep schedule.

I drew some foxes! They’re for a little personal project I’m working on. More of that to follow.

In unrelated news, I did a recent re-design of this art blog since I’m now using it as my primary website. Updating the old one in Dreamweaver any time I wanted to post anything was getting old and using Tumblr to power it is so much more efficient! The domain redirect should be working now, but if anyone happens to find anything that is broken, please let me know!

This should also mean I’m going to start posting art in this blog more regularly. Hurray!