One Halloween's Night...

With a creak the barn doors open wide.

Scarecrow held up his lantern and cried

This is our night of Jokes and Jitters!

Tonight’s the night to pretend ourselves silly...

Pigs can be pirates and hogs can be frilly!

The washboard started thumping loud.

The owls were hooting and cats meowed.

Bessie the cow got dressed in a gown

with fancy buttons up and down.

Halloween is reinventing yourself...

It's almost Halloween... as seen in this old art file. Halloween is possibly every person's favorite holiday, because we get to reinvent ourselves for a day. I've been reinventing my Mac Pro so now, like Halloween, my computer gets to be something new. 

Having installed a new SSD boot drive, a 2 TB HDD and 12 G of memory it feels like something else entirely. I've been re-learning the basics of adding new disks and linking and disk managing.  Not too hard to do.

So happily Photoshop & the Creative Suite now have a whole new lease on life.  No more waiting 2 minutes for that Indesign file to finally open.  Now it's more like 8 seconds to start the program and open the file. That's more like it.

It must be Fall!

It must be Fall! It's fun to be doing a book in tandem with the actual seasons - but then it's also fun thinking ahead to next Spring. I guess with children's publishing the seasons are often tied into the subject matter.  

Life on the farm...

This was fun - I'd never painted a potato field before this.

 

 I did work on a Maryland tobacco farm once when I lived in Washington D.C.

  and in a bull barn and a dairy barn when I lived in Manhattan Kansas...

  which was unusual for a city mouse like me.

Line, silhouette & a dash of bright color

I was pleased with how this piece came out - I managed to keep some of the spontaneity of the sketch in the finished color. It seems like I'm always struggling to choose a line for the finals - but in this one I combined several different solutions - colored line and silhouette shapes and a dash of bright colors.  Thanks to my pastel brush for the painting.