Art and Illustration by Claire DeWilde
It was an accident — in fact, it wasn’t even that. She had been playing in the woods with her wooden toys and had found the poor thing in the grass.
Of course, armed as she was, there seemed to be no convincing them.
What would you have done?
You might find some unlikely friends lurking in the leaves.
Opal and Tiny Cow walk into the bakery one morning to find all the pastries levitating above their heads. This is highly unusual, if you didn’t know.
A mystery in three parts! Dilemma, conflict, and resolution.
The fun: Creating a goofy mystery, experimenting with textures and light to convey distinct moods.
The challenge: isolating it down into just three images.
The result: I really want to have a tea party with aliens.
I look forward to making more stories with Opal and Tiny cow. I just love this duo!
This month I was honored to be in a juried art show called “Imagine II – The Art of Children’s Book Illustration”
Hosted by The dA Center for the Arts in Pomona with support by the SCBWI, it featured a whole wall of work by Leo Politti, which was awesome to look at, as well as artifacts and sculpture from the Petterson Museum of Intercultural Art. The space was absolutely filled with work from thirty-seven Californian illustrators, including a piece by yours truly!
It was great to come together for the Illustrators Reception and celebrate the art that inspires literacy and piques the curiosity of little humans.
As of this posting, you’ve got just a few days to see the show! The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 4, and it all comes down after September 23rd.
UPDATE: Here’s an article about the show.
Some of you may remember my dynamic duo from last year, Opal and her tiny cow (who has been simply renamed “Tiny Cow”). Well this year I put together a pitch for a point-and-click style storybook game!
I’ll only show a few tidbits here for reasons I’m sure you understand, but if you’re interested in working with me on this, email me! I’d love to collaborate with someone who knows how to put together apps, as I think this idea would really work on digital tablets.
A filthy-yet-charming American city in the early 1900s, Grenadine is home to a colorful cast of characters. All of them are possible perpetrators of various crimes ranging from minor to major. Alternate endings reveal a different culprit each time!
What excites me about this project most is there isn’t a single character that I feel lukewarm about. All of them are dynamic and exciting in their own way and I’ve been having so much fun writing stories for them. Ultimately, I do want to make this a digital, interactive game, but in the meantime I will definitely develop a little book or two.
This assignment asked us to provide a three-image narrative wherein each image was essential to the story and resulted in a surprise. What I enjoyed most was actually the formatting requirements. It was assigned to be set up in a french fold (folding the paper into quadrants) so that each image was revealed in sequence, doubling in size as it opened.
Take your time with each image before scrolling to the next. Hopefully any quirks in the formatting haven’t spoiled the surprise for you!
What do you think? Was the foreshadowing too obvious, or not obvious enough? Were you surprised?
Artful Armadillo