where does kitty go in the rain?

It's been a looooooooong summer, guys.  

It started out great with trips and anticipation, but it ended in the most bummer-est way possible.  Without getting into too, too much detail, there was a death in my husband's immediate family and any of you out there who have lost someone close to you know how that goes...it SUCKS. 

But sucky times seem to be drawing to a close now, and we're moving forward into fall!

School is starting!  It's my third year teaching at CalArts in the Character Animation department, and it is pretty fantastic. 

Me and Sean have an anniversary/birthday trip to look forward to in October!

It will no longer be one-billion-million-jillion degrees outside!  (Those of you in Los Angeles know what I mean: it's been freaking HOT.)

I have a couple big, important, awesome projects that I get to dive into head first!

It's all good stuff!

These illustrations are from a book I illustrated for Blue Apple LAST summer.  That's one of the toughest things about working in publishing.  You have to wait THIS LONG to share stuff!

It's an e-book, for the iPad and such, but I understand that it's going to be printed eventually as well.  I didn't actually know that while I was illustrating it, however, so there's a lot of things resting in the "gutter" on these pages.  Gutter is the fancy word for 'middle of the page where the crease in the book usually is'.  A good rule of thumb for all you would-be illustrators: don't put things in the gutter.  

The story is very cute and simple: a little girl wonders where her cat hangs out when it's raining outside, and she goes out to find him, and sees bugs and worms and stuff.

This is the title page.  I really like how that cloud turned out.  

I played with color a LOOOOOT on this project.  It would have been easy, but super dreary, to make every page gray and blue and rainy looking.  Instead I decided to try making the background colors different shades of desaturated, soft color, so it feels cool and rainy but not out and out sad.

And then yeah...the sun breaks out at the end and girlfriend finds her kitty!  I think this is my favorite spread, probably because I can very accurately remember squeezing my own cat in this exact fashion.