an award!

I was recently given this beautiful Sunshine Award by Julissa and Shirley. Both of them bring a lot of sunshine in my world, too, so I was very honored. Thanks, girlfriends!

I'm supposed to send this award along to 12 other people, hoping they will link back to me in their post and send it along to 12 other bloggers who bring sunshine into their lives.

I know this is difficult when everyone is so busy and a lot of people have already received this or something like it. I was initially just going to say "Anyone reading this has now received this award", but I'm going to go ahead and give it out to 12 peeps and if you are too busy or you have already gotten one, no worries. It's all about saying, "you brighten my day, thanks!"

Christina

Amy

Colleen

Deborah

Edrian

Kelly B

Kelly M

Helen

Penelope

Vanessa N

Vanessa J

Michael

IF - rescue

"Animal friends came from all over to help rescue the ice cream drips from Nikki's cone."

Ideas come from the funniest places sometimes. I saw a woman on the street the other day, wearing rolled up jeans, striped socks and little boots. Of course, I had to sketch her when I got home and, of course, I made her a girl instead of a woman. Then, I thought, what will she be doing on her walk? She could be eating an ice cream cone and her dog could be licking up the drips. When I saw the Illustration Friday word was rescue, the remaining animals showed up to help with the task at hand.

Click on the image for a better view.

j is for jellyfish

I finished another piece in my animal alphabet series. 3 done and 23 to go. I have a feeling I'll be working on this project for a looooong time. I can only work on it when I'm not busy with other projects, ya know what I mean? This one's for Jill. See this post for the others in the series.

On a personal note, for those of you who were following my daughter's 2nd attempt to make the cheer squad - bad news again, I'm afraid. Life can be so unfair sometimes.

expired

When I saw the word, expired, for this week's Illustration Friday challenge, I thought of a piece I did for the word, sour, a while back. The sour image was done in my old Photoshop style, so I didn't want to enter it, but I still liked some elements of the work, so I decided to recreate and improve it, in Illustrator. The top image is the new one, the bottom one, the original. Better, huh?

I always loved the colors here - the fushcia and white against the mustard yellow. So Yummy!

out with the old

More spiffing up going on...I changed the header on my website, deleted a lot of my older images and added a few new ones. It feels good to get a new, fresh look. ninasevenillustrations

spiffing up the blog

Now that we've sprung forward into spring, it's time to spiff up the 'ole blog. I finally changed my old avatar to this one. (something I've been meaning to do for like a year now!) I don't remember the last time I wore a headband and birds don't usually land on my hand, but other than that, it looks just like me! hee hee.

I also redid my banner, using my Happy Camper piece. I don't know why, but my banners always look a little blurry after I upload them to Blogger. I've tried all kinds of things to make this go away, but I've yet to figure it out. If anyone reading this has the magic formula, let me know!

I also deleted a really old Slide presentation that I had on my sidebar. I recently had a wake up call that caused me to think about what I'm putting out there for people to see. I forget that not everyone knows the difference between my old Photoshop work and my new Illustrator work. I recently received some feedback from someone in the Children's publishing world and one of their comments was regarding the style that I don't do anymore. It occured to me, they were probably looking at that slide show that had never been updated. Geez! I also need to go through my website and remove older work that doesn't reflect my new style. Now I know, it's better to have fewer strong pieces than a lot of work that may be cute, but not current to my way of working. Live and learn, huh?

Here we go again

Brave? My daughter trying out for cheerleader again this year. Yep, it's that time again. Remember this post from last year? I sure hope we have a better outcome this time around. I'll let you all know how it goes. Tryouts are next week.

IF - perspective

"You get a different perspective of the world, when you hang upside down."

I started this over the weekend for Illustration Friday, thinking I would do something quick, since I had other projects to work on, but of course, I spent way more time on it than I anticipated. I absolutely love how easily you can change colors in Illustrator, but it also causes me to change things a lot before I actually call something done. Originally her hair was black and the background was blue, etc. etc. I can spent hours messing around, because when you change one thing, it's a domino effect. You know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah!

Like I said, I love it, though! And, I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. If I could create fun things like this everyday and get paid for it, I'd be one happy gal. Maybe someday...