New Web Comic Comic: April Fool's Day Debut

As many of you know, I am starting a web comic called Pop Smoothie. The debut is April Fool's Day, rather appropriately.

Hope you all stop by! The first comic is called Dance Mom Wars...

Sketches in Spring Grove

 It's no secret that Spring Grove cemetery is beautiful this time of year. Today some friends and I went biking and sketching to soak in the atmosphere. The spring flowers are gorgeous but unfortunately we missed the peak color by a couple days. All the flowers are early bloomers this year, and we also noticed their time with us was brief.

Here are some sketches and photos from our morning outing. It was a spectacular morning.

Next week we plan to do some longer plein air setups and paint for a couple hours (if the weather gods are kind).

Grave Statuary

I don't know what these wooden cage things were next to some graves, I could only assume it was a zombie containment unit.

Sketches in Ault Park

Today is the first day of spring and it feels like summer. We have had friends in town for the weekend and decided to go to Ault Park yesterday to see the weeping cherry trees and other spring flowers. I also did some sketches. Ioana always tells me the plant species. (We always joke that she could make up names of some of them and I would never know)

It was absolutely gorgeous!

Afraid of how hot summer will be... On the flip side, I hope there are no freezes so my new blackberry plants I planted last year are not frozen out.

Below are some photos close to sunset.

Studio Pictures

Childrensillustrators.com recently added a "studio" feature. I was not very comfortable with it because my studio is often such a disaster. I usually am working on several things and the battle with entropy never ends...

But I recently tidied everything and took pictures. My painting studio needs to be painted and there is always room for improvement, but this is where I stand now...

Making Pysanky

Teresa's amazing collection!

Theresa is the master! The electric wax pen 

really makes the process easier.

I spent the evening over at my friend Teresa's making pysanky, otherwise known as Ukrainian Easter eggs. Or, in my case 'egg'... They take a long time and I am still a beginner.

My feeble attempt... I hope to be good at it one day.

Dragon Birthday Card

I have been mega-swamped but have a ton of new art I will be able to post soon.

In the meantime, a quick birthday card for my nephew I did this evening between sketches... The next dragon I illustrate will be Dash from Wordsworth and the Dragon!