Two miles out of the “biggest little town” of Kearney, Ontario, is its original school house which has been converted to an antique shop.  I excitedly rummaged through vintage tins, bear skin rugs, antler steak knives, and was delighted to find many beautiful old books. I settled on two, the first being Moons of Long Ago by Ellen Miller Donaldson. Dating 1922 it was a bargain at $3.The illustrations inside were by Charles H. Lassell, I’m not sure if they’re in copyright anymore. This book contains several short stories with wonderful titles, including “Little-Flower-That-Hides-In-The-Snow.” (The second book is The Burgess Animal Book for Children, which I will write about in a couple days.)

Has been a while since I did a doodle of one of Hera’s outfits… here’s one she long ago grew out of I just now had the chance to colour in using my new Intuos Wacom tablet. It’s taking some getting used to colouring with a digital pen, but it’s already so much nicer than using a mouse for these illustrations.

This is one of the most common questions I get regarding greeting card illustration. Fortunately the answer is an easy one… you can illustrate for greeting cards in almost any size! Card companies tend to vary their card dimensions between card lines so as long as you keep in mind these guidelines, there is a lot of flexibility as to what size you can illustrate your greeting card designs to :

• • Whatever size the publisher tells you : keep it simple, if you’ve been given a size to work with, stick with it.
• • Allow for bleed : paint/draw extra illustration around your main design (0.5 - 1 inch) to allow for some shifting for where the bleed will be trimmed off.
• • Use portrait format : Landscape format cards don’t sell as well as A) they don’t display well on card racks, and B) they don’t tend to sit well on a table. The main times landscape illustrations are used in greeting cards are when they are used on z-fold or u-fold designs.
• • Make it easy to scan : Illustrating larger than the size needed is always preferable. However, if your original artwork is small enough to fit on a scanning bed (i.e. 8.5 x 11 inches or smaller), it will save whoever is digitizing your artwork the trouble of either photographing your work or scanning it in pieces and stitching it together in Photoshop.

Other than those points to consider, you can illustrate to any size you’d like. You can find more tips on illustrating for greeting cards here.

Another artist I had the pleasure of meeting up with while in Canada was Miriam Dwyer, an Aussie artist with colourful paintings covering every wall of her home. My favourite piece was this one called “Swirling Seas.” It continues to prove to be a small world… a few hours from now I’m heading out to an art exhibit here in Adelaide with Miriam’s daughter!

While traveling in Canada, we stopped in Barry’s Bay, ON, to check out a few local shops we had passed on our way into Algonquin Park. At the Botanical Glassworks & Gallery I enjoyed the acrylic paintings local artist, Wanda Martin Hicks… loved especially her 4′x4′ painting “Tuscany” I took this snapshot of.

On our 24-hour-plus plane rides to and from Canada, we brought only one book for our 18-month old daughter… Alison Jay’s picturebook A child’s first 123. This hard paged picturebook is probably the best children’s books I own, not only because of Alison’s beautiful crackled illustrations, but because of how much depth, detail and storytelling goes on within each illustration beyond the simple 1-2-3 counting.

The story starts out with “one little girl sleeping,” and every page after illustrates the girl’s dreams which are quickly recognizable as a popular fairytales. From the 3 little pigs to the goose who laid the golden eggs, this picturebook allows parents to delve into the well-known stories on each page.
What Hera loves is all the additional counting on each page… on the Jack-In-The-Beanstock spread for example, it reads “7 seven magic beans” but you go on to count seven bumblebees, seven lady-bugs, and seven cows in the background. What also makes it delightfully thoughtful is that from page to page, there are characters and elements in the background that link to pages read and pages ahead

I tip my hat to Alison Jay for illustrating a fantastic book that my toddler brings to me to read to her day-after-day. I recommend this children’s book to any toddler…and parent! (We also have Alison Jay’s A-B-C book, which is also fantastic.)

Being back in Canada it was fun popping into various shops and seeing my illustrations in action on products. I stopped at Zellers and was giddy to find row upon row of the Truly Kettle Chips which I did the packaging illustration for. Though I didn’t get to enjoy the experience of taste-testing them in zero gravity like Rick Mercer, it was yummy scarfing down “my” own chips. We followed up the junk food binge with some of the Breyer’s Double Churned ice cream which my brother, Jason MacKay, did the illustrations for.

Just got back yesterday from our nearly 7 week trip to Canada to visit family & friends. Was a great holiday, starting with two weeks in Kelowna, followed by a week or so each in Toronto, Michigan, Ottawa, and Algonquin Park. I stumbled across some great art while there (see Miriam Dwyer, Wanda Martin Hicks, and Andrea Ross), took the plunge and bought an Intuos Wacom tablet, and even bought a few bags of the Truly Kettle Chips I did the illustration for. So lots of goodies to share with you all over the next few weeks!