covers + news

Hellow out there in the bloggaverse!  Here's a funny thing about working in publishing: you finish working on something and then it usually takes about a billion years for that thing to actually BE published and released into the world.  I have a constant backlog of things that I can't share, even though I WANT to.  

So here's a couple of those things!  This is a book cover I did for a re-issue of Enid Blyton's Tales of Toyland.  Just so you know, if you happen to pick up this particular version, I am NOOOOOOTTT responsible for the interior illustrations which are...very bad.  Anyway, I finished this super long ago.  About last August.  I just got a proof in the mail last week!

This is the proof!  It changed a little bit but that's normal.  I think it looks preeeeeeetttty cool.  

I also did a cover for a middle grade novel (shown here with the bleed edge intact!) about a sassy middle child, Confessions of a So-called Middle Child by Maria Lennon.  It's not out til August but it's pre-order-able on Amazon. I had a lot of fun with this one, doing hand lettering with brush pen!  I also did all the little doodles in the bg in brush pen and then scanned them (and yes most are relevant to the story).  And I made a ton of watercolor textures for this one, too, which is also super fun.  

Covers are FUN.  It's just really low-stress to be only responsible for a single image.  Usually I've got a whole book's worth of stuff to think about, and continuity to consider, and all that!  But covers are just one picture you can concentrate on.  It's a nice change of pace. 

Other things that are fun: illustrating books for awesome children's book writers.  Below is a screen shot from Amy Krouse Rosenthal's website.  I'm illustrating a book by her about a little unicorn!  Yaaaaaaay!

Her website is: whoisamy.com

This won't be out for a LONG time, but this is a sneaky peek!

Another thing that won't be out for a while (but which I received proofs for) is a 12 Dancing Princesses themed alphabet flashcard set.  I'll post all kinds when that's done, but for now enjoy this photo of my cat using the proofs as a playground.

She does not take my work seriously.  

Or anything, for that matter.  

Some other 12 Dancing Princesses goodies are heading down the pike too...stay tuned!

And yes, I AM busy.  But I did have time to clean up my desktop and take a photo of it.  It will be fun to look back on a few weeks when it's a total mess again.  

Oh yeah...and one more little fun thing: I got a new tattoo!  A little anchor.  

ozma of oz

This is my piece for an upcoming show at Gallery Nucleus, Not in Kansas Anymore: A Tribute to the Wizard of Oz.  

I chose a character from the books, ALL of which I have read.  It was a while ago (like twenty years give or take a few), so I don't super duper remember all the details, but I DO remember being really impressed with Ozma of Oz, the immortal girl ruler of the Land of Oz.  Here's my own version of her:

When I posted this on tumblr someone commented about how Ozma always has dark hair in the books.  Two things crossed my mind: do people on tumblr realize that _I_ posted this, and it's my own work, and that I can see their comments??  Helloooooo.  And also, this is MY version of Ozma, and in my version she is blonde and wears pink high tops with mismatched socks, so there.  

This is the post-it note that I sketched this painting on.  It is post-it note sized!

Here's a few instagram shots of sketches from my sketchbook:  to the left is my version of Dorothy...

Another little Ozma...


By the by, I'm missbrigette on instagram if you wanna be kept up to date on my dog pictures, cat pictures, shoe pictures, CalArts pictures, and occasional sketch pictures.

And a couple more Ozma sketches.  I really like this composition on the right, but I wanted to show more of her than just her head.  Think I'll put this idea in my pocket and use it another time.

meow meow kitties

It's that time of the year again: the time when I am in a bunch of gallery shows!  These two pretty kitties are for the Animal Kingdom show at Gallery Nucleus.  It opens this Saturday, February 16!  

It's been a while since I painted some kitties.  You want to know something weird?  I never feel like I really know how to draw a cat.  They're not super complicated, right?  Pointy triangle ears, loopy tail, whiskers.  But when I start, somehow, my drawings are just the most terrible, generic cat shaped blobs you've ever seen.  I tried to make these guys feel specific, and I think I managed it ok.  They're certainly different from any other kitties I've painted.  

They're not meant to be portraits of my actual pets (past or present), since I've never had a medium-haired-kinda-fluffy black cat before.  The gray stripy cat did come out looking like a cat I had named DC.  It stood for "Don't Cuddle me", since she really really hated everything and everyone and especially being snuggled upon.  Sort of like my present cat (who is gray but stripe-less).

The really funny thing about ever making an image with a cat in it is this: there is always someone who will say "OMG, that looks just like MY cat!"  

Is it YOU??

Also, notice how I resisted pink, yet again!

PS, in regards to the unicorn painting: it looks like there WILL BE PRINTS  of it AVAILABLE at the WWA Gallery!  Hooray!  They're not on the site, but I have it on good authority that they will be available at the opening.  

in the pomegranate forest

Hello out there in blogger land!  I have a painting for you!

This is for the "I believe in unicorns, too!" show at the WWA Gallery in Culver City.    They specifically told us that we didn't necessarily have to do a unicorn themed painting, but I couldn't get this image out of my brain once it was in there, so out it came!

For this painting I wanted to try breaking away from my usual palette, and I kinda succeeded.  Specifically, I noticed that when I open my website (http://brigetteb.com) there is a LOT of pink.  Pink and purple.  And I'm not surprised, cuz I love pink and purple!  But I AM surprised that I keep going back to pink over and over....and over.  And over.  Pink is my safety color.  So I tried some browns, and greens, and blues!  The pinks still snuck in there (although a kind of electric peach or coral), but I did end up using a color scheme from outside my comfort zone, so I call it a success.

As you can probably tell, I really love pomegranates.  I think their shape is so beautiful!  I didn't originally intend on putting so MANY in this painting, but as I was sketching I added them in and I'm glad I did.  Even though they are intricate suckers to paint.

See you at the gallery opening, maybe?  I love openings at the WWA Gallery, cuz it's right down the street from one of my favorite veggie restaurants, Native Foods!  I go eat a bowl of veggies and drink a gallon of watermelon agua fresca and then show up at the opening bloated from a fresca overdose.  I recommend it!

princesses for sale!

I'm pretty pleased to tell you that this week you can get the digital version of my book, Twelve Dancing Princesses, from the iTunes store for $1.99!  $1.99!!!  Do I need to explain to you that that is like two bucks?  

One penny shy of two dollars for this:

And this!  Not one princess, not two, but TWELVE. For a couple bucks.

All that aside, I'm very happy to be included in a group named "Beautiful Kids Books".  It's a pretty fantastic compliment.

Plus I get like...I forget how much exactly...like 5 cents for every digital book that's sold. (Just kidding. It's probably less than that.) 

This particular promotion lasts until the end of this week.  If you should happen to buy it, I'd really love to hear how it translates to the iPad!  I don't have an iPad myself, so I've never seen my book in that format.  

An addition teaser for anyone who is already a princes fan: I'm working on s'more 12 Dancing Princesses themed goodies with Chronicle books.  Stay tuned for more about that later!

happy holidays

I know it's kinda early...but is it?

This is the holiday card I designed for 826LA, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in Echo Park, Los Angeles!  They are super great and awesome.  

I never ever ever work for free (if you ask I'll say no) but when they inquired as to whether I'd be willing to donate some time + energy to illustrate a holiday card for them I said yes.   I just really believe that what they do is fantastic.  

If you live in the area, you can visit their Time Travel Mart store front (the front of the space is a little store, and the back of the space is a big giant room where they tutor the kiddies).  The store is very silly, and very very fun.  If you live in San Francisco you might be familiar with the Pirate Store, it's founded by the same folks.  

Read your kid a book!!!  And happy holidays.

I remember you

This is my piece for a group show at Susanita's Little Gallery.  The theme is the Ramones!  It opens early next month.  Each artist got to choose a song to illustrate, and I chose "I Remember You", cuz I like that song.

Acrylic on board.  And fun.

captain scratchy beard

Hey, so, I graduated from CalArts quite a while ago, with a degree and everything, but somehow I never got around to posting my films online.  Booooooo on me.  I know.  It's especially terrible because SO MUCH of your life in the Character Animation department at CalArts is spent on somehow, some way, producing a cartoon.  All by yourself.  It's an absolute miracle these things get made at all.  They're hard to do!!

So today, after almost 6 years of sitting on the server at CalArts not being seen by much of anyone, I finally got this thing up on Vimeo!  (I needed help from one of my students to make this happen. Learning never ends, people!)


So here it is, my fourth year film.

Captain Scratchy Beard from brigette b on Vimeo.

Yes, I made cartoons before I made books!  And the girl in my cartoon is reading a book.  How's that for foreshadowing.

Oh yes, by the by:

I get a lot of e-mails from folks (students, mostly) with a lot of questions about a lot of things. Mostly art things.
I'm going to try and do a master "frequently asked questions" post soon, so if there's anything, anything, ANYTHING you wanna ask, please feel free!
You can ask in the comments or e-mail me:  brigette.b@hotmail.com
If you've already e-mailed me, please don't feel bad!  I just get too many to answer individually, and lots of them are the same questions over and over, so it'll be better for everybody in the end if I can just get them all answered at once.
Cool?  Cool.

a curious poppy

This is my piece for the Curiosities show opening next weekend at Gallery Nucleus!

It's my first paper cut out piece, EVER!  

Instead of using colored paper, I cut the pieces out of plain white watercolor paper and then painted it with gouache.  It allowed me to have more fun with the colors and textures, and I had the flexibility of changing colors around if I wanted to.  Which I did.  

It's sort of hard to see, since I didn't do a really good job of photographing the piece, but I used a bit of thread wrapped floral wire for the stem.  It came ready to go in that lovely yellow green color.  There are also tiny little pins holding the flower in place!  Those especially didn't photograph well, cause they're so small.  

Little tiny flower face.  To give you an idea of the size, her face is the size of a penny (because I traced one) and the whole piece is 8 x10, which is a size I barely barely ever work in.  I'm usually trying to get myself to go BIGGER since my natural tendency is to go micro-small-tiny.

Here's a shot from mid-process.  It was messy, but pretty!  

marceline vampire queen

This is my contribution to the Adventure Time Tribute at Gallery Nucleus this month!

What'd I do here?  I pretty much took Marceline (because I like her. I like female characters that are unapologetically bitchy) and made her Brigette-y.  I gave her a cute dress and a strawberry base!  And fancy red toenails and a garden of sharp pokey plants!  Why doesn't she already have one?  She loves red things. 

I had to put Tree Trunks in it too, because Tree Trunks is my favorite Adventure Time episode!  Not just because my husband and my friend boarded it together, but that doesn't hurt.  

It should be a good show.  And by a good show what I mean is, it should be a gigantic cluster f%&# of Adventure Time fandom.   The previous Adventure Time themed show at Nucleus was NUTBURGERS.  I'd never seen it so packed before!

Speaking of Nucleus, if you were hankering for a print of my Beatles piece, you can have one!!

CLICK THIS FOR BEATLES PRINT!

Meanwhile:

I'm working on illustrating a book,

teaching two classes at CalArts next year,

and my birthday is this month!

Good stuff!

gravity falls

About four years ago my friend Alex asked me if I'd do some rough character designs for him for a pilot he was maybe going to make at Disney TV.  It was going to be about a brother and sister who spend their summer in a weird town in Oregon with their creepy old uncle.  It never got made though.  Too bad, it was going to be really cool.

Oh wait, no!  That's not right.  It DID get made, and now it's on TV! It's called Gravity Falls! It exists!  WHat!

So, the following drawings were done before Alex even had a story for the pilot.  He gave me a written run down of what the characters were like and I just doodled out a bunch of stuff.  I'm sort of embarrassed at the sloppiness of these now that I look at them again (after four years of being rolled up with a rubber band and stashed in a drawer) but that's sort of what first passes are like, for me at least: frenetic searches for shapes and personalities.

I can't remember exactly what Alex told me about Dipper, but I do remember this: Dipper is based on Alex as a kid and he should also have a hat.  What kind of hat was still up in the air...maybe a captain's hat, or one of those Greek fisherman's hats, or a kinda too big trucker hat?

The one on the far left is still my favorite (that's why it has an asterisk).  

Mabel's prompts were something like: wears hideous sweaters, is Dipper's foil.  She was supposed to be the fun one. I could relate to the sweater thing.  I was a kid in the late 80's and early 90's when sweater factories everywhere were on an ugliness rampage and I recall, vividly, the horrors of that era...sweater-wise.  I had a pink one with heart shaped glitter balloons on it.  WHY.

Oh man, I just realized that Mabel still has a little headband like in the asterisk sketch up there!  That's pretty neat. 

I took a pass at Wendy too!  All I remember Alex saying was "Maybe she's tall? I dunno."  She was always meant to be Dipper's crush, and older and cooler but not bitchy in any way.

So I messed around with making her look tall and awkward, and sort of mellow in an indie-teenage-awkward tall girl way.  

OH yes, and I did a bunch of little Grunkle Stans.  These were fun because old men are gross.  They have weird shapes, like squiggly parts where there shouldn't be any.  

So, if I remember right (which I might not) these designs were used as a loose jumping-off point for the pilot (which is not the pilot that was on TV, but a very rough pilot that like nobody has seen), and then stowed away, and then ultimately it was decided that the show should look more like Alex's own personal style of drawing, which is how it looks now, which really is appropriate since it's his semi-autobiographical cartoon creation.  

There are a few things that remain from this first pass though, like the shape of Mabel's sweater and Dipper's slightly too-short shorts, and his trucker hat.  

I did do a few more drawings before it was decided that the style of the show would go another way.  These are more nailed down, cleaned up and such: 

I love those ringer tee shirts, with the color on the neck and the arms and rest white.  

I think those braces that are just floating rectangles were Alex's suggestion...or they were my idea in which case I take aalllllll the credit.

I thought it would be really cute if Mabel had little boots.  Did anyone else have beloved cowboy boots as a kid?  I did. 

I still do.

Also, leggings.  Girls in the 90's were all about leggings.

So fast forward a bunch to the present:

Now my husband works on Gravity Falls, as background supervisor, and amazingly succumbed to peer pressure and made a blog of his own!  He's going to be posting his background drawings n stuff on it!  

Here it is: I'm Sean Jimenez

I may have a biased opinion, but I think he is pretty cool.

Not to mention the fact that I have a bunch of buddies who also work on the show and make it look all beautiful and stuff.  It seems to already have a sort of cult-ish following even though only one episode has aired (if tumblr is any indicator at least). If you haven't seen it, I think there's a freebie episode on itunes, AND there will be new episodes every Friday on the Disney Channel until they run out of new episodes. 

Anywho, I feel sort of honored to have had first crack at designing these guys.  

fab four

This is my piece for the Gallery Nucleus All Together Now: A Tribute to the Beatles!!

When I was in high school the local radio station played "Bedtime Beatles" every weeknight.  It was a pretty fantastic mash up of every and any Beatles song, including music from their solo careers.  I would tune in and when something really good came on I'd tape it (how analogue of me) right off the radio.  I kept those tapes for a long long time.  

When I was researching (e.i.: googling Beatles pictures) for this piece I came across a LOT of blogs curated by teenage girls who are STILL totally, head over heals, in love with the Beatles.  It warmed my little black heart.   I would have been all over tumblr if it had existed when I was a teen, tumblin' photos with captions "omg i love him" and "my heart just stopped" and "why wasn't I born 40 years earlier".  

Aesthetically, the early Beatles are my favorite.  Their matching suits!  Soooooooo cooooooool!  And Beatle boots!  If I was in a band I'd want us all to wear matchy matchy outfits to perform.  

flavia sabina de luce

This is my piece for the Book Show!

It's based on the Flavia de Luce novels, specifically The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.  I like the part when she melts down her sister's lipstick and infuses it with poison ivy.   Oh Flav, you vengeful little creature.

For those of you who haven't read the book (or books...there are 4 total with another one on the way and I've read em all wooooo!)  Flavia is a really interesting gal, not just because she's an 11 year old chemistry whiz/girl detective/British aristocrat/lives in the 50's, but because there are so many contradictions in her character.  Her mother died when she was a baby, so she doesn't remember her, yet she is obsessed with her.  She wonders why her sister's don't like her yet she goes out of her way to terrorize them constantly.  She's scary smart and sneaky and yet monumentally naive.  She's kinda bitchy and manipulative but supes vulnerable at the same time.  I love her and hate her alternately when I read the books...she's all complex!

She lives in a big old rotting English country house, where she has taken the Victorian-era chemistry lab as her own.  I wanted to show her in her natural habitat, among the chemicals and books.  The story takes place in the 50's, but the lab is totally old school and kinda mad-scientist-y.  At least that's how I picture it.

She talks about chemistry a lot in the book(s). I tried to take chemistry, but bounced out of the class when I realized that I had no idea what the &$%# was happening and had no hope of catching up (it was a city college class, so you could kinda do that).  Flavia certainly makes it interesting, compelling even, but I was so completely lost in that class.  Much like John Cusack in this particular movie clip!

cheer book art

While digging around in the folders on my desktop looking for stuff to update my portfolio with, I ran across many (many many) folders of artwork from the CHEER! series that I worked on last year.  Then I realized that I never posted any of it!  I guess I was waiting for the books to come out and kinda forgot!  It all works out because now I can post my favorite drawings from the third, fourth and fifth books altogether.  

Unfortunately, the last two books had very, very few illustrations in them at all.  I guess they weren't selling so hot and they had to cut back where they could, so the books went from having about 80 illustrations total to having about 12.  Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!

This is one of my favorites from all 5 books.  This girl is in love with Dustin-something-pop-icon-kid (basically Justin Bieber), so I got to draw really silly, jacked up versions of Justin.  The narrator, like myself at that tender high school age, really doesn't get the whole boy band infatuation thing.

The team mascot in the book is this wall-eyed bear costume.  Ha ha!

These are "artsy" kids.  I like the kid with the cameras.  He's really into photography, man!

A fashion blogger type!

I always like drawing tea cups.  Or coffee cups.  Any cups, really.

New York boys.  Too cool for school!

Little spice dudes!

Another Dustin-Justin, signing autographs with a booger in his nose.  

Did anyone else have teachers that looked like this?  80's blouses, miserable wrinkly face, sensible shoes?  I think all of mine were this way.  

Who hasn't wished they could high five someone through the computer screen?  Is anyone working on this technology?

These were all done in good old fashioned Photoshop, by the way.  I used a scratchy-inky brush.

In other news, I have a big THING to share with you soon and it has to do with 

Disneyland 

and Toy Story 

and Mickey Mouse 

and t-shirts 

and vinyl toys. 

 Doesn't that sound cryptic-ly exciting?? 

 I can't divulge any specific stuff YET (well, they actually gave me an official blurb I could post on my blog but it is so obviously not written by me that you'd probably be offended that I posted it at all, assuming I thought I could trick you, and then you'd be mad and never come back, right?) but as soon as it all goes down I'll post lots of pictures and it will be great!