Thanks for visiting my illustration website… it is currently going through some content-spring-cleaning in prep for a new site to be launched early 2017.

Easter Eggs � Heather Castles
With Easter around the corner, I’m getting in the holiday spirit making egg carton flowers, and drawing colouring pages for Hera. Feel free to download the PDF colouring page and enjoy scribbling away! (And if you email me your little one’s colouring efforts, I’ll post them here for them to enjoy and be proud of!)

Has been a while since I’ve posted… still loving being off on maternity leave, my kids are keeping me busy! Halloween is around the corner… paper bats, kleenex ghosts, and paper mache pumpkins adorn our windows… and here in South Australia spring has sprung and the birds are singing, the flowers are budding, and the leaves are GROWING BACK! So it’s a bit weird having Halloween in the spring, but hey, we’ll have fun anyway!

Had a little time to turn one of my watercolours into a colouring page for Hera, thought I’d share! (Just right click to view full sized image, and save from there to your desktop.) I enjoyed using my ipad to vectorize (digitally trace!) this illustration in InkPad using my new rubber-tipped stylus I picked up for 50 cents on eBay.

(Please keep in mind this colouring page is for personal use only, the original illustration is from my royalty-free seasons collection and is available at Imagezoo.com.)

I’m excited to announce that four of my illustrations are now available as royalty-free illustrations on ImageZoo.com! I did these watercolours nine months ago, right before Hank was born. You can check them out, along with the rest of my illustrations available royalty-free at ImageZoo.

Lately I haven’t had much time for illustrating, as being a mum of two little kids takes up all my spare time. I’m enjoying the occasional creative outlet with drawing things for my daughter to colour… mainly her riding on dragons and dinosaurs!
I did manage to squeeze in this illustration… I was inspired a while back by Dave DeVries illustrations derived from his children’s artwork, and thought it would be fun to give it a go! A few months back Hera suddenly learned how to draw “people” and I ended up with a stack of paper full of families of people with arms and legs freely growing out of their heads… couldn’t let them go to waste! So I traced one, used the head shape, mouth & eyes, arms & legs as the basis for my pencil drawing “Ugly Mermaids.” I then gave it a little colour using my iPad with a Dagi Stylus and Sketchbook Pro. Hera’s original drawing is shown at left. Hope to do more of these, they were fun… am currently working on illustrating the drawing Hera drew of me having my birthday ;)

Easter Eggs © Heather Castles

With Easter around the corner, I thought I’d illustrate a few Easter coloring pages to keep Hera busy for a while! Feel free to download the PDF colouring page and enjoy scribbling away! (And if you email me your little one’s colouring efforts, I’ll post them here for them to show the world :)

I had drawn this illustration a year ago as a concept sketch, then yesterday used Inkpad on my iPad to vectorize the pencil illustration… loved using that program, was the first time I had used it and it felt very natural tracing my illustration on the iPad with my dagi stylus. Even made me think Adobe has some serious competition… I love Adobe Illustrator, but when you can buy an app app like Inkpad for $4.99 which is so easy to use, why would anyone want to spend hundreds of dollars on the desktop version?

p.s. If you’re looking for more coloring pages for your little ones, you’ll also love this adorable April colouring page by Crystal Driedger.

I realized I never posted about the launch of the ScoliosisDiagnosis.com website, featuring Nina Saab’s book (and my!) “Bookie and the Scoliosis Diagnosis.” It’s a light-hearted picture book for kids aimed to educate as well as raise awareness of the detection and treatment of scoliosis at an early age.

Tom Krause, author of “The Little Boy’s Smile,” recently sent me this link to a reading of our story up on YouTube… enjoy!

Hope you all have a wonderful Halloween :) We’ll be going to the hospital to visit my son Hank, who is doing very well by the way, is two weeks old now, and over his birth weight weighing 850grams. Then doing a little trick-or-treating with Hera later in the day. She keeps saying “Thank you for Halloween!” and carrying her little jack-o-lantern around the house. We’ll be doing a little colouring as well, have a fabulous Halloween colouring page from Crystal Driedger… check it out here!

The above Halloween illustration is available royalty-free on ImageZoo.com.

My second go using Sketchbook Pro (my first go being to digitally colour this scanned pen illustration) was fun, just did a study of my feet while watching the tv (yes, they are bare in the winter, yes I am pregnant!) This is the first time I’ve done something painterly with digital medium and was pleased with how it turned out… but was a bit more awkward this time around using my finger to draw with, especially for finer details, so am looking forward to picking up a stylus.