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.