preliminary sketch - Negative Numbers are Dangerous

My daughter's math teacher was showing them how to use a graphing calculator, and said "Negative numbers are dangerous." She meant if you don't input them right, you get the wrong answer, but I took it this way.

Wedding Invite: the pencil comp

A friend is getting married in Hong Kong this year, and she asked Serena to do the invitation, and me to do the drawing. She said she wanted swans, so my first take on this was to do them like an Asian brush painting.

When she saw them, she said don't do that. Go full-out fairy-tale style.

For me, that's like saying to your puppy, "No, don't play with the rubber bone. Here, have some steak."

I mean, I love Chinese and Japanese brushwork, it's absolutely amazing. But even more than that, I'm the biggest fairy-tale geek, so I was all over this.

The final will be in full color, so I get to have even more fun.

The Sad Fate of the Happy ABCs

Remember how I said that Arianna liked her book so much that she took it to the crib with her? Well, there was this one particularly sleepless naptime, with this resulting carnage:


However, perhaps there is a bright side. The ABCs are dead, long live the ABCs! I had such a good experience printing up Arianna's Baseball Catch that perhaps I'll do the same for the Happy ABC. Although this time it won't be watercolor comps, oh no. It'll be the newer, slicker computer illustration kind, as seen below:

Actually, the main benefit to doing it is the local printer binds books with spiral binding, and the book printer binds it like a real book. So maybe Arianna will be able to get her book back, and it'll be somewhat harder to destroy. Or maybe I should just print it on metal plates.