Squam is only two weeks away now, and I’ve been busily preparing these last few weeks. One of my classes is travel journaling, which I’m really excited about. I have been coming up with interesting prompts to get imagination revved and pens to paper. There’s a big stack of them now… and I’m thinking about [...]

(drawing above by the lovely Christine Castro Hughes)
My friend, the Super-Duper-Creative Rama Hughes has a cool contest going right now… The Happy Birthday Portrait Party! It marks the one-year birthday of his on-going portrait parties.
How to play: You and a friend pair up and draw portraits of one another. You can leave it at that [...]

I liked this…

I recently got an email from Nina asking me two questions. (I’ll tackle the second one in a later post.) But the first one was: “I am interested in learning about techniques people employ for developing better connection with color - special exercises? do you keep library?”
I thought this was a great question. And you [...]

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY[/youtube]
I thought this was brilliant. If you have 20 minutes, it’s well worth it.
Thanks, Jacqueline. :)

We are doing a special topic and event this week over at Illustration Friday.com — The very first Illustration Friday Gallery show! All the info you need to participate is right here… should be so much fun. Special thanks to Open Books in Long Beach, California for making this happen. :)
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Happy October everyone! And happy fall. It’s one of my favorite times of year. I just love the crisper air and changing leaves… it’s such a good time to celebrate. So to get us all in the spirit of the Halloween month, I have a new contest!
I think it will be so fun. The idea [...]

This is what came out last yesterday/last night as a result of createathon. I am really happy with it and had SO - MUCH - FUN (!) working on this…

Right after I blogged about it yesterday, Riggs called and said to come in for the meeting. I learned that they had named the park art [...]

Today is bubbling with possibility… creativity… and goodness. (my favorite things!) Because today is “Createathon” at my husband’s work. Createathon is a 24-hour, round-the-clock creative burst aimed at providing pro bono marketing and creative services for nonprofit organizations. Lots of creative vendors (art directors, designers, writers, photographers, illustrators (me!), and strategists) are pitching in to [...]

Okay, a few posts ago I promised some web tips… how to build an effective website. I am going to qualify this by saying: I am certainly NOT an expert on websites or their effectiveness. And I am going to further qualify this by saying: In fact, I am pretty much a web-idiot. So take [...]

I just wrote a post about life creeping into art on the IF blog. Maybe you’ll dig it… I would love to see your connections too!

I love that you can change the expression on a face just by slightly adjusting the eyebrows… a little furrowed… a little lift… a little sideways. Bushy eyebrows. Manly eyebrows. Thin ones. Arched ones. Eyebrows can be so easily overlooked, but I think they are the key to a character’s expression. These small lines in [...]

having fun scribbling cause beauty is often times in the mess…

Also updated my work section with a bunch of new goodies. (Updating your site is a great way to work when you don’t feel creative… an hour or two of brackets and inane symbols makes me want to paint again.)
And I’ve been playing around with [...]

I just wrote a post about the Quilts of Gee’s Bend over at the IF blog. Maybe it will inspire you, too…
happy tuesday, friends.
p
p.s. If you’ve emailed me lately, I’m sorry I’ve not responded… we went out of town for the weekend and I’m just catching up.

Fourth episode is up… (final painting stage)
(and a chance to see one of my new pieces that I haven’t blogged about here yet.)
Gotta get back to work… so much to do I feel a little insane…

Third episode is up… (finished sketch phase)
* * * *
Sorry… still no time for a real post. Still swamped. Soon though. I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Second episode is up… (rough sketch phase)

Design Sessions: Notes on Design has asked me to be a guest blogger on their site this week. Their audience is mainly design students and those just entering the field, so I thought it would be fun and relevant to walk them through how the illustration processs works… from project beginning to final art. And [...]

Wanna see some of the goodies I’ve been working on? I just updated the Work section of my site. (click refresh if you don’t see new stuff.)
I think I’m finally starting to hit a stride in my work. A confidence and peace with it. I know more solidly what I do and what I can [...]

Hey, remember self assignment #3: Document your average day? Yeah, my days got very not-average for over a month. The dust seems to be settling just a bit (most major renovation done, most boxes unpacked, and back to work) and I thought it was time to resume fun stuff like the self-assigments.
So below is my [...]

I don’t know if you do this, but it always helps me to design a space when I have some inspiration to go by… I am not so good at making up interior design I guess. So I keep a book of cut out pictures from magazines, paint chips, fabrics, etc. It helps me to [...]

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Katherine Dunn for Illustration Friday. Her work is so beautiful and she’s such a big inspiration to me. She seems to have balance down to a science (an organic, natural science of course). Click here to read it. I hope you will enjoy her work too.
(And speaking of [...]

These self-assignments are doing good things for my creativity I think. They are helping my mind wake up a little (stretch and yawwwwn!) and look at things with a little different perspective. It’s refreshing! So onto assignment #3.
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I finally found an hour to do self-assignment #2… the black and white shapes assignment. At first it was kind of intimidating. After I had inked my paper and cut it up into different shapes (I went with all angles, no soft edges), I sat there looking at the shapes and felt some hesitation to [...]

Susanna suggested that I tell you the other ten assignments and we can do them together. Good idea! So if you want to play or need a little creative boost, here’s the next one:
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Lately I’ve been feeling a little blocked creatively. I’m still doing the work (because when it won’t come and a deadline is looming one must force it) but it doesn’t feel fun or alive when your heart isn’t in it. So I’ve challenged myself to do 10 self-assignments to mix things up and help me [...]

Hello friends!
I hope you in the US had a good Thanksgiving filled with people you love. We went back to Indiana to spend the holiday with Colin’s mom, and it was great to be back. The drive was long and studded with traffic jams. But the food and the company was wonderful. Big hugs, familiar [...]

Thank you all for participating in the Black & Orange Contest! It was an huge array of amazing work… Everyone would win if it were up to me (and I had a million dollars to spend on Dick Blick gift certificates!). Our judges definitely had their work cut out for them. Here are the three [...]

One last reminder that today is the LAST day for your Black and Orange submissions. Get them to me by tonight! Cause tomorrow the judging starts!
p.s. Happy Halloween, friends! :D

We now have over 180 entries in the The Black and Orange Halloween Contest! If you haven’t sent one, you have less than a week to go… All submissions are due Tuesday, October 31st!

paint on wood. approx 21″x29″
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was asked to donate a painting to the Tonic Ball in Indianapolis (where all proceeds go to feed the hungry through Second Helpings). Remember I couldn’t figure out what to do with the green background I painted? Well, I finally figured it [...]

It’s been quiet here on the blogfront, huh. I’ve been so busy working lately that I haven’t been online much (save for uploading new images to the Black and Orange contest). I am planning on going on a little road trip with my brother starting the middle of next week, so I’ve been cramming all [...]

A while back I mentioned that I keep image journals… “mini side paintings” I think I called them. I have put together a collection of one of the books for you to see. They are nothing special… lots of times just splotches of color on a page. But I like them anyway. They keep me [...]

The 3rd Penelope Illustration Newsletter is up. Click here to read it.
And click here to sign up to receive the next newsletter announcement in your inbox.
Hope you like it!
-p

This weekend we stayed at Tom’s and Alison’s house, like we do most weekends now. And it was wonderful. Feels good to have more space for Vince to run around and it feels good to not worry about bothering the people who live in the apartments above and below us. But mainly what [...]

I just finished a whole bunch of colorful backgrounds for a book I’m working on… They are all around me on the floor and my eyes play games with the colors and patterns… those two could make a good looking watermelon. I wonder where that leaf path leads. Green coffee beans. A magenta water park [...]

Colin started his new job last week, writing for a new agency called Riggs. Riggs does this really cool thing called CreatAthon, where once a year they take on a dozen or so not-for-profits that could use some help and they stay up all night working on campaigns for them. This year’s CreatAthon fell on [...]

Here is one of the paintings I completed while in SC. It was for the Baltimore Sun… a story about a woman who remembers going to girl scout camp when she was ten years old.
I liked painting this one because I played with different borders before landing on the branches (I don’t normally do borders [...]

Well, I’m back in flat-as-a-pancake Indiana and I’ve been tongue-tied since I’ve returned. Not sure where my head is or what is the clear message that is coming forth from the mind chatter. I just kind of want to let it settle. Savor it all for a few moments more.
Being around Tom and Alison [...]

I like to do little free form paintings in my journal as I work on illustrations for clients. They help keep me loose and I really like just doing what I feel like… whatever the color looks like it wants.

My husband and I take a lot of photographs. I mean, A LOT. If you meet us on the street, chances are that we have a camera on us somewhere and most likely will take your picture when you’re not looking. As I was looking through our iphoto library, I started to notice all the [...]

“To have good ideas, have lots of ideas.” - Linus Pauling
Those notebooks pictured above are all filled to the brim with the loosest, crappiest sketches you will ever see. Millions of chicken scratches. A graveyard of bad ideas mixed in with a few good ones that made it to the promised land of finished illustrations. [...]