stage and play pricesses + give away!

Long time no see!

I thought it was about time I had another give-away, not just because I have a whole box of Stage and Play Princesses, but also to breath some life into this crusty, neglected old blog!

Stage and Play Princesses is based on my book, Twelve Dancing Princesses, the simplest way to describe it is to say that it's a kind of toy theater, but more toy than anything else.  It's made out of heavy, thick cardboard, and the box has a drawer on the front so that all the pieces can get tucked away when play is done.  

Pretty cool, huh??  I remember having toys sorta like this as a kid, like paper dolls and a cardboard castle, but nothing as nicely made or inviting as this.  My inner child is freaking out over this thing.  

There are a LOT of pieces, including four different back drops, a horse drawn carriage, 15 different princesses, a king and queen, a cat, a tree, a bunny, a chair a dog, a pig, a tea party...tons of stuff!!

OK OK, here's the give away part!

 GIVE AWAY!!! 

The rules: 

• Leave your e-mail address in a comment to this post.
• I'll use an random number generator to pick a winner!
• US residents only please.  Yes I know, but these things are kinda heavy so int'l shipping is not an option...this time around, at least.  International folks, don't worry...I'll have a less hefty giveaway soon.
• I'll pick a winner on March 29!!
• Yayayayayayay!

PS: Please don't be alarmed or confused when your comment doesn't appear immediately after you post it.  I have comments moderation turned on, to keep my blog free of robot spam and haters! There's no need to repost, and your comment ought to appear within a few hours. :)

OR, if you're not a risk-taker, you can get a set the old fashioned way: buy it on the internet!

They are available at the Chronicle Books website 

and on Amazon, because everything is on Amazon.

Please notice my dog is in this set.  Yep, that's Lila!

(Cat for scale.) (Also, she just wouldn't go away.)

(Cat drawings below for fun.)

princess abc flash cards + GIVEAWAY!

I've been working with Chronicle Books on some new Twelve Dancing Princesses themed goodies.   Wanna see??

Here they are: Princess ABC Flash Cards!  Illustrated by yours truly.

You can get them from the Chronicle Books website, 

or from Amazon (of course, everything is on Amazon).

OR 

...you can enter the GIVEAWAY to win one!!

The rules: 

• Leave your e-mail address in a comment to this post.
• I'll use an random number generator to pick a winner!
• US residents only please.  Yes I know, but these things are kinda heavy so int'l shipping is not an option...this time around, at least.  
• I'll pick a winner on October 21!
• Yayayayayayay!

The giveaway is closed!  Thank you to everyone who entered!

Let's take a look at these things!

A little info: the characters are based on my book Twelve Dancing Princesses, and artwork from my Princess Matching Game.

They come in this neat little box, so when you're not learning your ABC's you can stow them away!

They are made of heavy, cat-proof cardboard so they won't bend or rip unless you try REALLy hard!

They also have round edges so little hands won't poke them into little eyes.

Here's a few of my favorite cards!  There are 26, naturally, but it would make this post very verrrryyyyy long to post all 26 of them.

If you have the previously mentioned Princess Matching Game, you're probably having deja-vu right now.  That's because a good portion of artwork for these cards was up-cycled from the matching game. 

 Why did I use a dorky word like up-cycle?  Because a funny thing happens when you take artwork from a 2" card and blow it up to 6":  it needs to be adjusted, and spruced up, and man, does it ever look different when it's bigger!  And three years have gone by!

I had to do a lot of adjusting and composing and photoshop magic to make the old artwork useable.  Fortunately for me, I tend to keep EVERYTHING on separate layers in photoshop and label each layer meticulously, so opening up the old files was not too bad.  But it WAS still a lot of work.

Here's the king and queen from the matching game.  The biggest differences are little things: the king's medals got more refined, and so did the queen's pearls.  They looked so blobby when I resized them!  I also had to adjust her dress shape and re-do all the details in her hair.  It was like they both got make-overs!

...and then some of the cards are just entirely new artwork, like this horse draw carriage! H is for Horse drawn carriage!

R is for Princess Rose:  Princess Rose got a make-over, and like all the princesses on these cards she also got her name-sake flower put in her hand.  

J is for Jewels!  I loved working on this card.   

N is for Nighttime: I like this one a lot.  It's a friendly kinda nighttime.

Y is for Yawn:  This is straight out of the book!

M is for Marigold.  Marigold made the cover of the box.

S is for Shoes...I love this card.

And I is for Iris.  I like this one because Iris sort of looks like she's pretending her iris is a microphone.  

It was definitely a unique experience re-visiting my own artwork.  Usually you put something out there and that's it, it's done, no do-overs.  I never imagined I'd get the chance to go back and fix/tweak/refine these gals.  

Stay tuned for a winner to be announced next week!!

...and PS: did you notice that cute little black doggy on the front of the box??

That's my cute little black doggy!

Her name is Lila!

That's a little fun-fact trivia nugget for you.  

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!

twelve dancing princesses

My book Twelve Dancing Princesses is out this week, officially, in the world, for you to buy, and love and cherish!

So I thought I'd go back in time to when the book wasn't finished, to when it was barely just started, because it didn't just materialize out of thin air and Photoshop. Like most big projects, it developed in phases and rather slowly. There was lots of sketching and doodling and revising and things that didn't really look like anything that I'm surprised my editor could even understand!

Let's start at the beginning, when I chose what era I ought to place this far away kingdom in. I did NOT want to just do whatever-fantasy-far-far-away-princess-royalty-mashup. I love fashion history, and costumes, so I had to be specific. I liked the idea of doing an 18th century Mary Antoinette fanciful French style, but that has been done, and very beautifully, and one of my own favorite illustrators Kay Nielson, and I can't front Kay. I chose the 1830's-40's, because the kings were dapper, the ladies had big fantastic hoop dresses, and the shoes were appropriately similar to ballet slippers!

See?

I love how GIANT the dresses in that era were! Can you imagine wearing something that big? Everyday? Fitting through doorways in it? Going to the bathroom in it??

I did a few very rough and tumble character designs, for proportion and stuff. All twelve princesses are basically the same princess with different hair and dresses. To design and re-draw and remember all the puny details of twelve separate princesses sounded very not fun to me. It was challenging enough just fitting all twelve into each composition!

Since the story was already written and given the a-okay by my editor, I moved along to thumbnail sketches. They are very rough, and very small: I drew them on 1"x1.5" post-it notes. I did that so that I could doodle a composition and then if I didn't care for it immediately peel it away and draw another one. I went through an enormous stack of tiny post-it's in such a way. The compositions changed very little from what you see here.

This is the whole book in post-its!

I did all the final illustrations in Photoshop. I had to BUY Photoshop, because I had previously had only bootlegged versions of it (from being a student and to be fair, no student can afford that schnazz), and it kept crashing and asking me for serial numbers, and finally just wouldn't open at all. SOOOO expensive, but worth it in the end for a version that actually WORKS. It was a serious crisis for me for about 3 days, back when I was just beginning to work on the final art.

Yes there's like 100 layers, and they are all labeled appropriately. Virgo style.

What I take away from making this book is basically this: I really love making books. I'm beginning work on a new one...but that's for later!