Ripple Blog on Wednesday!

This is my donated drawing for Kelly Light's fantastic Ripple blog. The idea is simple and great: illustrators donate original art dealing with the oil spill disaster, Kelly auctions them off, and ALL proceeds go to help the bird and marine life of the area. This month is Great American Illustrator month and she's already sold some amazing cards from folks like Mo Willems, Frank Dormer, and Jarrett Krosoczka.

My card goes up for auction this Wednesday, July 21 at 6:30 PM EST.

Above is a slightly enlarged view. The actual card is ink on 2.5 x 3.5" watercolor paper. It's called A Day at the Beach. For details on how the bidding works, go to the Ripple blog and look at the right side column.

Around the World via My Studio

This summer, I'm hard at work on the art for my next graphic novel, Around the World (due out in 2011). The first of the three stories in the book that I'm drawing involves the unstoppable Nellie Bly. Above is a picture of the 6x4' bulletin board in my studio (I love that thing).

Heather, the book's amazing designer (she also designed Storm) made this incredibly useful mini-version of the rough sketches for the story with temporary placement of the dialogue. This way we could all get a sense of how the story was working. As I drew each page, I started marking them with scraps of post-it notes.

Here it is about a week and a half ago... which means that now I've finished drawing the whole Nellie Bly segment. So now I'm painting and finishing all of the pages. When that's done, I'll start on the second of the three stories. Then repeat.

OK, break over...