happy new year!

Whoo-hoo! We did it! It's another new year and we are here to celebrate it! 2011, you were good to me and I appreciate all the wonderful things that you brought me, but I have a new best friend and her name is 2012. Tonight we will drink a toast, watch fireworks and steal a kiss from our loved ones, like most people in the US.

I thought it would be fun to see what other traditions and customs are celebrated on New Year's Eve around the world. Here's a few of the ones I found.

In Spain - When the clock strikes midnight they eat 12 grapes one with every toll of the clock, to bring good luck for the next 12 months of the New Year.

In Hungary -  they burn effigies or a scapegoat known as "Jack Straw" which represented the evils and misfortunes of the past year on New Year's Eve. Jack Straw is carried around the village before being burnt.

In China - For the Chinese New Year, every front door is adorned with a fresh coat of red paint, red being a symbol of good luck and happiness.

In Denmark - it is a good sign to find your door heaped with a pile of broken dishes at New Years. Old dishes are saved year around to throw them at the homes where their friends live on New Years Eve. Many broken dishes were a symbol that you have many friends.

In Wales - At the first toll of midnight, the back door is opened and then shut to release the old year and lock out all of its bad luck. Then at the twelfth stroke of the clock, the front door is opened and the New Year is welcomed with all of its luck.

From this website.

happy holidays!

I made this cool sign with the ransom note generator over on letterplayground. Anyone can join in the fun and make some artsy letters to showcase on the site. Pretty awesome, huh? Try it, it's fun!

free holiday printables

Kristin from papercrave always has the most fun and charming things to blog about. I thought I'd share a link to her roundup of free holiday printables. A one stop shopping trip to printout your holiday gift tags and other fun stuff. She even mentions my group blog, We Love to Illustrate, which really is an honor, considering the line up of super talented designers she showcases. Happy printing, cutting and wrapping!

fun holiday things

Check out this cool idea for creating some unique packages, using kids art - from Martha Stewart, of course! I also love this pink felt stocking, from Rock Paper Stitch, it's just so cute!

holiday gift tags

I thought I'd remind everyone about the holiday gift tags I did last year for We Love to Illustrate, since we are in the midst of gift wrapping season. You can download them right here. They are also available on the freebie page of my blog.

artist charity auction

 

Have you heard about fab surface designer Khristian A. Howell's artist charity auction? Each daily auction will run from midnight to midnight (EST), and 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Toys for Tots, American Humane Society, and American Red Cross. What a cool thing to do and so many awesome items to bid on. It only runs through Dec 9th, so go check it out, before it's over!

a new look!

Hey everyone! My blog's got a brand new look! So, if you're reading this on Google Reader or some other kind of feed, click on over and see it! A special thanks to Kristina from One Happy Mama for helping me with it. Web coding and I do NOT get along very well. She helped me create my vision for it and I couldn't have done it without her.

let's chat

I love it when I get to see designs I've done used in fun, clever ways, like in the above greeting card design from the latest issue of 365 cards. I illustrated the retro phone as a stamp design for A Muse Studio a few years ago and seeing it again made me realize how much I like it. I particularly like the way card designer, Carly Robertson used it here. Love the little twinkle sticker in the center of the dial! and Let's Chat is the perfect wording to go with it.

new holiday photo card designs

I've got some new Holiday Photo card designs over at pingg.com. Customize these with your own photos and you're good to go for your holiday cards!

pingg interview

Pingg just launced a new Meet the Designer series on their blog and guess who the 1st designer interviewed is? Little 'ole me! I'm so honored - you can check it out, right here.

designs for Indigo Prints

I have a couple of card designs over at Indigo Prints. A Baby Shower invite and a We're Moving announcement card. Indigo Prints is an online stationery company that produces beautiful, high quality personalized products, including invitations, announcements, notecards, address labels and more. There are so many lovely images from independent designers on their site, I feel lucky to be a part of it. You can go directly to my page, right here. If you are moving or having a baby shower, perfect! I hope to add more images in the future.

fabric for Robert Kaufman!

A few months ago, several designers from Pink Light Design were asked to design a fabric collection for Robert Kaufman, called Menagerie. It's now available to view on their website and I was one of the lucky ones to have a pattern chosen for the collection. I did the chickens and they are shown in 3 different colorways. It's always so exciting to see my designs on products! In stores - Dec 2011.

FREE Halloween Cupcake Toppers

download here

Happy October! We have a new post up over at We Love to Illustrate, where we are sharing with our readers some fun cupcake toppers for Halloween. And we have a guest artist this month. The lovely and talented Tamara Henderson joined us and not only did she take part in the challenge, she designed our monthly banner. So cute! You can see and download all the designs, right here.

Happy cupcake decorating!

what I'm working on



Today is my birthday...gonna have a party. It's gonna be a good one. Yeah, yeah, yeah! And since it's my birthday, I wanted to check in with all my blogger friends and say Hi! I don't blog as much as I used to, due to the fact that most of the work I'm doing is for licensing and I'm not allowed to show anything, until it's actually on a product! Which is hard, because I want to share!

I'm still doing some freelance projects, too, so I'd thought I'd show these little sneak peeks of a project I'm working on now, for Dwinguler. It's another playmat, like this one, that I did for them earlier in the year. The one I'm working on now, is all about fairy tales (obviously!), and I'm having so much fin doing it.

Hope you are all doing well, my friends, out there in Bloggerland. Please leave me a comment and say Hi, I miss you all!

another feature

We Love to Illustrate is also featured on Sunshine Smile Publications for the month of Sept! Lucky us!

TDAC feature

My group blog, We Love to Illustrate, is featured on They Draw and Cook, from Sept 1-4! We all did recipes for their Cooking 4 Kids Contest. Our Sept post is up, too, so you can see all the recipes we did on our blog or on the TDAC site.

TDAC - hidden treasure muffin recipe

 Did you know that They Draw and Cook has a Cooking for Kids contest going on right now? Yep, they do and here's my submission. You can see a larger version of it on their site, right here. The contest is sponsored by allrecipes.com and entries need to be in by midnight (EST) on Sept.12th.

I had a lot of fun with this pirate themed recipe and the idea of finding a chunk of chocolate hidden in a muffin sounds like a winning recipe to me! OH, yeah! Yum!

If you haven't been to the TDAC website, it's a must see. Nate and Salli have done a fantastic job putting it together.

Illustration Friday - swell

FREE coloring pages

Happy August! It's time for a new post at We Love to Illustrate. This month we all made coloring pages, based on birthday jungle animals. They are all FREE for you to download and print out. You can download mine right here. And to see them all visit our site, right here.

Printsource 2011

Pink Light Design is featured on Print and Pattern today with our promo ads for Printsource. Here's my ad, using one of my brand new patterns from my woodland critters collection. This one is my favorite of the collection, because of the hedgehog. He just cracks me up!

etsy shop

I opened an Etsy shop! Well, in actuality, I re-opened an old Etsy shop, with a spiffy new banner and I'll be selling illustrations this time around. My old shop sold original  mixed media art pieces, way back in 2007! My new shop will have mostly prints for kiddos, and I hope to add downloadable activity sheets, greeting cards and digi scrapbook collections, some time in the future.

I'm starting small and will add things here and there, as I see how it goes. So far, I've put up some images from my animal alphabet series and one of my favorites from a We Love to Illustrate post.

You can check it out, right here.

Circus time!

Happy July! Since it's the 1st of the month, you know what that means - it's time for a new post on my group blog, We Love to Illustrate. This month we all did a circus theme illustration. So fun! I really enjoyed making circus animals and playing with circus themed fonts.

Check out what everyone did, right here.

Launch

It's been awhile...hello blogger friends! Thought I'd pop in and do Illustration Friday this week. This is a rework of a card I did for Indigo Prints, that ended up on the reject list. I do have a couple of cards that did get picked up by them that should be on the site soon, but this one didn't make it. I added the little boy's face to the rocket and changed a few other things and it worked out great for this week's topic.

It's a "fake" card, I don't really know a Nathan that's turning 4,  but if I did, he would have a birthday party just like this one!

 

FREE downloadable Summer desktop calendar

Hello and Happy June! Since it's the 1st of the month, it's time for a new post over on my group blog. This month we are celebrating our one year anniversary, so everyone did a summer theme and we decided to offer them as downloadable freebies for your computer desktop wallpaper.

You can download mine, right here  1920x1200  1680x1050  1280x1024

or click here to see all the lovely entries from the girls at We Love to Illustrate. We've had a great year blogging and emailing together. It's so awesome to be part of such a talented and supportive group.

Illustration Friday - soaked

I haven't had the opportunity to participate in Illustration Friday for such a long time! I've been missing it, so I spent a little time yesterday making this little bunny in the rain.

Have a great week, everyone!

surtex promos

It's almost here! Surtex is May 15-17, in NYC, and my work will be shown there, through my rep, Pink Light Design. Above is my promo ad and matching button. The buttons (from all Pink Light designers) will be attached to Pink Light Design tote bags and will be give-aways to clients. Cute, huh?

We were featured last week on Print and Pattern! Of course, I was absolutely thrilled to be on P&P. I've been an avid reader of it for years. Thanks so much to Mary Beth Freet, from Pink Light Design, for this amazing opportunity!

birthday wishes at We Love to Illustrate

Our new post for the month of May is up over on my group blog, We Love to Illustrate. Everyone did a birthday themed illustration, so there are lots of fun colors and festive images to see. Check it out, right here. This is what I submitted:

Flower Garden PlayMat

I designed a series of PlayMats for Dwinguler awhile back and the 1st one has come out and is available on Amazon. This one, called Flower Garden, is for baby girls, with it's predominately pink color palette. As you can see by the photo, it's double sided, with a large floral pattern on one side an an ABC pattern on the reverse.

I received one as a sample and I have to say, these mats are really top quality. They are thick and spongy, but very durable. They have a slightly bumpy texture and are super easy to clean up, if something gets spilled on them. You can just wipe them with a sponge. They are Eco-friendly, too, which is always a plus.

Here's some details of the designs:

 And here's a link to the Amazon page. If you need a Mat for your baby room or playroom, or know someone who does, these are really fun and, like I said, very good quality.

Happy Easter!

Just popping in to say Happy Easter to all my blogging friends. Hope you all had a fun day and didn't eat too much chocolate! I'm still working like crazy, getting ready for Surtex. Only a couple of weeks left, to finish all the collections I want to show there.

inspirational quote

I really love this quote, by artist, Chuck Close. It's so TRUE!

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."
— Chuck Close

Now, get to WORK, everyone!

Illustration Friday - bottled

For Illustration Friday this week. Spring has been bottled up all winter - it's finally starting to come out. Hello Spring!

Spring pattern shown above is available for licensing from Gibson and Holt.

FREE easter downloads

download here

Our monthly post is up over on my group blog, We Love to Illustrate. This month, we all did something fun for kids to celebrate Easter. There's a lot of variety, we all did something a bit different and as usual, my fellow illustrators came up with some stellar images. We have such a great group! You can download my activity page, right here, under the image, or go check them all out, right here. Happy downloading!

pink light design

I'm so excited to share with all my Blogger friends some awesome news! I'm now represented by Pink Light Design! I'll be doing Licensing work for the surface design industry. I'll still be working with my kid-friendly images, but also mixing it up a bit and taking on some other subjects as well. I also have images available for licensing through Gibson and Holt, in the UK.

I'll be showing at Surtex, in NY, in May. Well, my work will be there, anyway, with Pink Light Design. So, if you're at the show, stop by their booth and say Hi to Mary Beth, she's an awesome designer and super nice, too!

Well, I better get back to work, lots to do to prepare for the show! 

fan mail

I had a delightful surprise arrive in the mail a couple of days ago. Fan mail! Ashley, a 3rd grader, from Mrs. Besecker's class wrote me the most darling letter, telling me how much she liked my designs and she also included a drawing of hers, that she did as a re-creation of my bunny face card. So sweet, don't you think?

I'm going to return the fan mail and send Ashley a special surprise, too. But, in case she reads my blog, I won't give away the secret, yet. I never thought in a million years that I would ever receive fan mail, so thanks, Ashley!

Illustration Friday - cultivate

Here's a detail of a large piece I did recently for a product that's not been released yet. It was perfect for this week's Illustration Friday theme of cultivate, so I thought I'd show this "sneak peek." I'll post the whole piece once the product is out. It will be used on a PlayMat for babies. Have a great week, everyone!

illustration friday - stir

These cats are ready to stir up some trouble! One of my new patterns, available for licensing from Gibson and Holt - gibsonandholt.co.uk

crazy about patterns

Did you know I'm crazy about patterns? Yep, it's true and I've been making a lot of them lately. Most of what I've been working on is hush hush for now, but I did this one today and decided to post it here on the 'ole blog. I'm calling it Sweet as Candy, because it reminds me of chocolate and cotton candy.

baby images at WLTI

Hello, March! Nice to see you! Since it's the start of a new month, that means we have a new post up, over on my group blog, We Love to Illustrate. This month we did the theme of Baby and we also are hosting our 1st Give-away, to say Thanks to all our followers! Head on over there, check it out, follow us, if you don't already, then leave a comment and you could win small prints of our Baby themed illustrations.

Have a great day, everyone!

Illustration Friday - sweater

Who doesn't love a dachshund, wearing an argyle sweater? For Illustration Friday this week.

a new look!

I finally took the time to spiff up this much neglected blog. A 3 column template and a new header makes it look all shiny and new! Thanks, Blogger, for making it pretty easy to do!

Illustration Friday - reverse

Look at me, posting 2 days in a row! It's been so long since I participated in Illustration Friday, so I did a quick one for this week. Reverse ewes. Why did I choose ewes? Because ewe is a palindrone, it's spelled the same in reverse! I could have done other palindrones, like kayak, madam or dad, but ewe was easy to come up with, in reversing the black and white colors. So, that's it - hello IF, I've missed you.

my owl barn cards

It's almost Valentine's Day! If you like owls, and who doesn't!, head over to myowlbarn.com and download some cards for free! The top one I designed and the bottom one was designed by Shivani, who is creator of myowlbarn. She says she's not really an artist, but looky - it's adorable!

My card 

Shivani's card

She also features tons of adorable owl goodies, it's an owl lover's heaven on earth, I tell ya. Hoot! Hoot!