.Books Fund-raising and CD's.

As usual I've been working on getting my kids book ideas out there in to the hand of publishers and hopefully one of them will jump with excitement and want to publish one of my picture books.

For now i'll let you know that the local school has decided to buy two copies of 'The Missing Spots' and asked me to sign them and possibly come in to the school to talk about it to the kids. As I have terrible stage fright this might go horribly wrong but we will see.

I have also been working on creating a new smaller picture book purely for the purpose of fund-raising money for my disabled cousin so he can have a shiny new specially built bicycle.
The book will be called 'Christian Can' and have a short but heart felt poem through the book along side some illustrations of mine.

Finaly I have gotten feedback on the cd cover design I'm having a go at, I was told the characters on the rollercoaster where a bit too childish, so i've re drawn them, the differences are like so ...

I'll keep updates coming as stuff happens, watch this space!

.So.Far.I've.

Just a quick post to let you all know what I've been up to.
Recently been woke up at unspeakable times with a flood of ideas for various children's books, they've all been written down and saved for a day when I'm not busy. Also a few other projects have popped up, not paid work yet but all something for me to work on and possibly gain a few pennies from.

To make things easier 'kids book wise' I've logged back on to LuLu.com (speak of the devil, they've just emailed to say my order has shipped) and downsized all my currently for sale books so they will be cheaper to buy and still look good.

I've been researching like crazy in to children's book publishers in the UK and across the waters, with the help of Children's writers and artist yearbook I've made a lot of progress over a short time. I've already sent a few manuscripts out to a few publishers (6) and got 3 back so far, fingers crossed for the rest. I've ordered a batch of my downsized books to send off as dummy books to publishers and also to show to nurseries in hope to gain public interest. (yey)

... and thats about it so far. Watch this space! ..it's quiet nice to look at.

.Caricatures.

I seem to be drawing a lot of caricatures lately, some chi bi's and some face portraits. I think it's cause it's simple to do yet effective, also it's fun :) and it helps when I have a drawing block.

Here are my latest drawings.

.caricatures.

As a few of you already know, I've had a creative block for a while now so to get me back in to drawing I did a caricature of a mate and this is how it turned out.

Also i've recently been asked for another caricature/cartoon commission that I will be starting work on very soon. See my website for details of commission prices and terms, thank you!

.Actual.Touchable.Book.

Yey! my copy of Timmy & The Magic Bean arrived :D next thing to do is research in to publishers and send out letters asking sweetly and nicely if they will publish my book for me ha ha.

.More.Chibi's.

.It.Starts.

It started with an experiment of drawing myself and it looked good, so I drew some one else..that looked good too. All of a sudden the potraits became popular and i'm being asked to draw even more, so now i'm charging :) all details on potrait comissions on my website http://www.wix.com/bex_eden/bex-eden-illustration check it out!

Below is the first few potraits I have done.

.Vs.

Having no inspiration can be a good thing because then when a competition comes along that has a deadline pretty soon, it will push you to create something unexpected in a short amount of time.

A situation like that came upon me recently, a competition related to the film Sucker Punch they wanted a mash up of things against things, the more random the combination the better.

The winner gets a signed book of artwork from the Sucker Punch movie created by Alex Pardee, not much to some people but a lot to me. So I gave it a go anyways, considering I did this in a week this is what I came up with.

The Atomic Poodle Vs Bruce Lee! how random is that!? ha ha

.Gravity.Defying.Fluffball.

..Carrying on with 'Kidz'n'Pets this is the last image I created before I decided to give my self some time off from art to re-syke my mojo. I'm going to do an experiment with this image and paint it in a different technique to see which looks better, which ever one works best is the style i will be continuing with.

.The.Finished.Image.

Remember a while back I said I was work on a HUGE painting? well 'big' painting, I don't usually do them this big. Anyway! so far I've only posted snippets of pictures and photo's of it but now I've finally finished it :) So below is the finished piece!.

This picture was started as a thing to keep me going on the creative stuff while I had a art block, now that it's finished I'm considering entering it in to the Ferrens open exhibition.

.people.picture.colour.

Finally! I've finished colouring the image! this has been one grueling piece of work and has taken just over a week to complete, that is me working on it about 3 1/2 to 4 hours a day. In the end I'm glad I've complete it but am now in a dilemma as to whether or not I like it best with a plain background of textured one, so comments appreciated!

.people.gathering.

All that talk of people drawing was not exaggerated one bit, here are the line drawings of all the random people in the basics of my plan. I'm going to experiment with colour to see what works best then maybe add texture.

.sketch.book.project.

Here are a few photo's from my sketchbook project starting points! I had no idea what to put on the first page so I started in the middle of the book! :)

Traditional Drawing

Lately everything I've done has been digital drawing or simple cartoons on the wall, I felt like i hadn't done any proper drawing in ages! so today I tried using Charcoal with my watercolours as I hardly use charcoal, and I think it went well :)

Band Picture Colour

The colour version of my earlier band drawing, my I just mention the drawing was not traced all drawn by hand. and I had fun colouring it too :)