It has been quite some time since my last blog update. I had attended the SCBWI conference in LA and it was an excellent experience. I met with quite a few people that were able to give me some great feedback on my work. It was my first venture into the world of Children's Books and the publishing industry, and it was very informative. You can hear me sum up my experience in 32 seconds right here on youtube
Since the conference, several great opportunities have come up. First of all, I recently signed with East West Literary Agency. They are representing me as both an author and an illustrator and i'm very excited to be working with them. I have already started work on two books, and it's been a great experience so far.
Earlier this year I was in a gallery show at Gallery 1988 where I entered a piece based off of the cult tv/film series "Firefly" and that thing caught internet fire and spread like a bad case of herpes... or a good case of herpes... This clip came to mind when I started seeing my name on the internet
anyway, my work was featured on many of my favorite websites. The actual artwork itself was purchased at the gallery by Seth Green He is awesome! Kenny Fisher, Scott Evil, Oz, Chris Griffin, etc. etc. etc.
It was awesome having having Seth Green buy my artwork and meeting him. I didn't think it would get much better than that. About a month later I got an e-mail from River Tam herself, A.K.A. Summer Glau. My girlfriend Kristin and I had a chance to meet her, but I'll save that for a whole other blog post. There's some exciting things happening that I can't share yet, but it will be awesome!
As a result of the success of that gallery show, i've been invited to 5 gallery shows next year for Gallery 1988 that i'm pretty excited about. Most of the shows have excellent themes that I'm really looking forward to doing something for. More on that later as well.
I've started working on two new books. Last year I spent quite a bit of time working on my first book, and while it was a great learning experience, I think of it as more of an exercise in storytelling and illustration as opposed to an actual product. I've put it in the vault for now, but here are a few page layout sketches.