Well, I’ve been off maternity leave, freelancing part-time for the last three months, only to go back on it again… am delighted to be expecting my third baby in August. So, I will be continuing my casual approach to blogging for a while longer!

If you were thinking of contacting me for illustrations while I’m on maternity leave, I am referring my clients to Jason MacKay… he’s a talented digital illustrator with published children’s books under his belt, has a great style and work ethic… and he’s my brother, so I know him personally and recommend to anyone looking for illustrations!

This is your (belated) holiday card :) Hope you had a happy and safe holiday with your family and friends!

Was fun making Christmas Cards out of some of Hera’s old drawings, a great way to reuse them. Hera & I glued the drawings down onto cheap holiday cards from the dollar store, then once they were dry we cut them out and did potato stamps on them.

I’ve wanted to do this for years, and having a 3-year-old to do it with gave me the perfect excuse to have a go at making potato stamp holiday paper. Was an easy, quick craft… all you need is a small potato and knife to cut the pattern out of it, a little paint and a flat container to put it in, and large paper. We reused Hera’s old drawings, which added a quirky flare with creepy stick figures peeking through the trees! Hank was too busy practicing crawling up and down off the ottoman to join us ;)

Hey guys, unashamedly asking for some Likes on this photo of my humble workplace up on ImageZoo’s Facebook page! If I get the most Likes I’ll get a lovely prize for having the coolest workplace among my colleagues with illustrations available at ImageZoo.com! Just click on this specific photo, and Like it before Friday when the contest ends… thanks!!!

I was saying to my husband recently I wish I had more time to draw… and he suggested just setting up next to Hera on the kitchen table and drawing together, even if it’s only a few minutes. I’ve been really enjoying it, and Hera especially enjoyed drawing the same thing… I took one of her drawings of our car, made copies, and she and I both coloured it in. (Similar to what I did with Ugly Mermaids.) Was fun, looking forward to doing it again!

BTW, a few have asked how Hank’s doing… really great :) At nine months old, he’s just under 7kg now, a smiley happy little guy, and sitting up (with a few pillows propped up around!) He has started crying “Mmmmmuuum!!!” when he’s upset.

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 ;)

About a week before my son Hank decided to arrive early, I had some time on my hands to doodle some of Hera’s toddler outfits she outgrew this year… had a little time today so thought I’d share the latest for my illustrated diary of Hera’s outfits. They are all pen doodles with watercolour washes done in my sketchbook… haven’t done much watercolour on plain bond paper before, and found it made for very warped paper afterwards! Wouldn’t recommend it for a lot of layering of colours, but for a quick study it’s fun.

An easy craft that’s fun for kids is reusing paper bags by drawing on them and using them as gift bags. If your kids are really little, draw some fun characters on them, tape them down on a firm surface, and let them colour away. You can write a message on one side of the bag and skip buying a card altogether. Aside from being a lovely personalized giftbag, it also saves you from buying gift bags, and is also good for the environment if you reuse paper bags. It’s a great craft for toddlers, Hera loved colouring in these bags for her cousins, especially drawing pictures of them on the dinosaurs!

Here’s another of my drawings for my diary of Hera’s stuff, a little Oilily top with Peruvian doll pattern. I used a completely different “medium” for colouring this illustration digitally… used my iPad! I’ve been loving my iPad (my 30th birthday present) and I use it more than my imac now due to its portability and super functional apps.

So this weekend I took the plunge, broke the bank and spent $7.95 to buy Sketchbook Pro, the acclaimed sketching app for the ipad by Autodesk… and LOVE it. I’m not much of a digital illustrator, but I do like to colour my pen/pencil drawings on occasion on the computer.

I gave it a go yesterday for the first time, and must say it’s a much nicer experience colouring on screen with my fingertips than it is using a digital pen and looking up at a monitor. Not to mention was pretty cool being able to draw on my iPad away from the computer snuggled up in bed! It’s extremely intuitive to use, and aside from a few pages showing you how to use the program I didn’t need to look up any supporting documentation to figure out how to adapt it to my illustration style. From start to finish, the app is very simple to use, I just :

• • Dragged the scan of my “real” pen drawing into an Album in iPhoto I’ve dedicated to artwork.
• • Plugged my iPad into the laptop to sync with iTunes.
• • In the iTunes iPad Photo tab I set it to automatically sync all images from my iPhoto artwork album every time I connect my iPad. (Note : the Sketchbook Pro app has the ability to “Add” images to itself from iTunes, I just didn’t find it worked. The “Send To” button DID work however, which is how I later got the PSD file out of iTunes)
• • Once the sync was done, just opened up Sketchbook Pro and clicked on “Open Image” icon to access my photos on the iPad, and found the album titled “artwork” and found my sketch.
• • From there I found it similar to working in Photoshop, in that you have layers to work with (and can set the opacity of, or adjust to multiply or screen), a myriad of drawing tools. I found I kept wanting to do more (like cut, paste, use the magic wand…) to finish up the illustration, but found the drawing experience itself very enjoyable. Especially zooming in and moving around the image, felt much more intuitive than using keyboard shortcuts and a digital pen.  Felt a bit like finger painting… without the mess :)
• • Once I was all finished with the colouring, I was able to “Export Layered PSD to iTunes,” and from there send it to my desktop.

So far, I really like Sketchbook Pro. My only complaint is the small canvas size (1024×682 at 72dpi)… would love to be able to work on actual hi-res sketches. For any illustrators using an ipad, it’s well worth the spare change! I’m waiting to hear from my brother with his experience using a touch screen stylus in conjunction with this program… if it’s good I might buy one as well!

Has been a while since I’ve done some illustrations for my Diary of Hera’s Stuff… was feeling like doing something creative for myself after being off sick with morning sickness, having a couple projects keep me busy (greeting cards & cheese packaging, which I’ll share once the packaging is launched!), and surviving cold & flu season! Anyway, with Aussie winter coming to an end I’m putting away clothes that don’t fit our growing girl… here’s one of the outfits I drew, was a cute little knitted sweater picked up second hand knitted by some other little girl’s grandma.