Mountains & Plains Winter Catalog.

Dream Boats is the featured book in this winter’s 300,000 copies of the Mountains and Plains Independent Book Sellers Association Winter catalog. It’s on the cover, and a few little vignettes made their way into the inside of the catalog as well.

Mountains & Plains is an almost 40 year old non-profit professional association of locally-owned bookstores, booksellers, and industry professionals. Wherever you are, please support your local, independent bookstore this holiday season. If you happen to be in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming, there is a list of store locations on the MPIBA website.

My favourite Vancouver bookstore is Kidsbooks (Kitsilano, South Surrey, and Edgemont Village, North Vancouver). Their staff is incredibly knowledgable, and the are wonderful advocates for local authors and illustrators, and for great books for kids (and teens)…and they even have a few for adults!

.

.

This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

.

Featured Reader Art & Event Reminder.

This fantastic dream vessel, rendered in marker and ballpoint pen, is courtesy of 7-year-old avid reader, Ella. Thank you very much, Ella!

Also, a quick reminder that I’ll be at Village Books in Bellingham on October 5, 11am for an illustrator Q&A, beginning with a short talk on illustration. Not sure yet what I’ll talk about yet – maybe about influences and inspiration, style (or lack of), or that I learned the most important thing about creating art, not from art school, but from my grandmother when I was 5 years old. Or maybe why I chose to illustrate this book the way I did, and the challenges I encountered along the way… Bring your questions!

.

.

This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a gallery of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

.