2014 Life with Girls Fairy Tale Calendar

2014 Handmade Family - Life With Girls Calendar is finally available in our web store!

Originally concieved as a "Poor Man's Portfolio", the Life With Girls calender is a way that we're able to offer 12 high quality, full color prints for a very reasonable price.

Calendars are spiral bound, with 8x10 image sizes and have all your favorite holidays such as "talk like a pirate day" and "international self portrait day" on it. In addition to that, each calendar comes with a hand drawn sketch of us wishing you a happy birthday on your birthday.

Featuring scenes from The Brave Little Tailor, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Seven Ravens, The Fox and the Crow, Little Red Riding Hood, Thumbelina, The Princess and the Frog, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel, and The Forest Sprites.
The concept behind this years calendar is theater, fairy tales, and dress up. I chose 12 of his favorite fairy tales, and illustrated them, designing cut paper sets and costumes for the family to act out the stories on stage.

http://handmadefamily.indiemade.com/product/2014-handmade-family-life-girls-calendar

2014 Handmade Family - Life With Girls Calendar!
Originally concieved as a "Poor Man's Portfolio", the Life With Girls calender is a way that we're able to offer 12 high quality, full color prints for a very reasonable price. Calendars are spiral bound, with 8x10 image sizes and have all your favorite holidays such as "talk like a pirate day" and "international self portrait day" on it. In addition to that, each calendar comes with a hand drawn sketch of us wishing you a happy birthday on your birthday.
Featuring scenes from The Brave Little Tailor, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Seven Ravens, The Fox and the Crow, Little Red Riding Hood, Thumbelina, The Princess and the Frog, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel, and The Forest Sprites.
The concept behind this years calendar is theater, fairy tales, and dress up. Mr Handmade chose 12 of his favorite fairy tales, and illustrated them, designing cut paper sets and costumes for the family to act out the stories on stage.
- See more at: http://handmadefamily.indiemade.com/product/2014-handmade-family-life-girls-calendar#sthash.rBfZVtyo.dpuf

Life With Girls

 Have you seen the Life With Girls webcomic yet? Mr. Handmade has been writing new strips for the old Daily Life cartoons since before Christmas, and has rebranded it as Life With Girls. Basically, it's stories about being a stay-at-home dad of two daughters. Right now, he's republishing all of the old Daily Life illustrations as he works on a new format, moving forward into a more ongoing story, instead of a series of anecdotal illustrated status messages.
He's pretty excited about the whole thing, and we are very proud of how the project is shaping up. You can find it at www.LifeWithGirls.com.

Watercolor Wednesday:
Spring is finally (maybe) here in Missouri, and when it's not raining, Mr Golden peeks his head from behind the clouds. Today is one of those glorious sunny days, and I thought I'd celebrate it by posting this sun painting in the Online shop.

As always, thanks for stopping in, take care, and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Gnomes, Camping, and Cats

I seem to go through bouts of blog attentiveness. I like to write, I really do. There's a lot of things that I want to share, or at least talk about, and sometimes the girls just don't cut it. So, blogging is part sharing what I'm up to, and part organizing my thoughts...Also, I'm maybe involved in too many blogs for someone who doesn't get paid for it. Ha-ha-ha! This is getting awfully close to an apology post, which I promised I wouldn't do! Basically, I was looking at some blogs before bed, and thought "Self, you don't write enough anymore. You enjoy it, so why don't you do it?" and I figured I'd explore that "out loud".

 

This week I finished up coloring  this set of illustrations, and I'm super excited about them. This is one of those dream projects, where you enjoy the whole thing from start to finish. 

 

 The brief was basically gnomes and camping and off we went, looking at Moonrise Kingdom, merit badges, mushrooms and rainbows.

 

We treated size pretty fluidly as the imagery was explored...How big IS a gnome, anyway? We're all really glad that spring is here, and are looking forward to the summer, when Mrs Handmade is on holiday from school. We think this is the year for a camping trip. :D

And finally, it's watercolor Wednesday in the online shop. This week, we have a playful little kitten with a ball of yarn. I don't have any pets myself right now, so sometimes it's hard to think of complete themes in these paintings. Luckily, as an active member of the craft community, I know about four hundred ladies with cats...

Doing a little side illustrating each nite as a warm up is a great way to get some personal drawing time in, explore content that I may not normally work on, build on drawing skills, and get into a "work" frame of mind.

I hope you all have a great week. Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Life With Girls, Fairy Tales and SPACE

The last couple of months have been crazy busy. Between the start of show season at Green With Indie, then vacation to Arizona with Abby (who just turned five), followed by St. Louis ComicCon and the Small Press and Comic Expo in Columbus, Ohio, I haven't had much time for anything. Then, when you add in the Life With Girls web comic, finishing up Volume 1 of the Handmade Fairy Tales book, and client work...well, you get the picture. The thing is though, despite being exhausted and more than a little stressed out, this is still the best part of my life so far. :)

S.P.A.C.E. is the yearly Small Press and Comic Expo, held in
Columbus, Ohio. I shared a table this year with my friend Leighton Connor, the writer and illustrator of Laser Brigade, and creative director over at Hex Games. It was a lot of fun, we had a late nite adventure putting his comics together at Kinko's (which I chronicled over on the Life With Girls blog), the best barbeque I've ever had, and got to meet some really great creators.  No matter how ready I seem to be leading up to a show, it seems like I'm always up until 2:00 in the morning the nite before, making "one last thing". For this show, it was bookmarks.

There have been a lot of late nites recently, as I've been working towards some major milestones on personal projects. I got the first volume of the Handmade Fairy Tales book done just in time to order have them for S.P.A.C.E...Actually, I was sweating their delivery a little bit, as they didn't arrive until after noon on the day I was leaving for the show. They came out fantastic, and all six stories are so good. We're really excited to finally be able to share this first volume with you in our online store. You can also check out the first story, "The Brave Little Tailor" by Brandon Graham as a free download, in the downloads section of the site.

 

Getting a good print run of the "Life With Girls" comic was another huge project for the show. We collected the first twenty-four strips of the 100 themes project (plus a couple of others) into a 5.5 x 8.5 book. The story of a stay-at-home dad of two daughters, the comic has both day to day "slice of life" type stories, as well as more fantasy stories, looking into the minds of the children, and the people they love. It's also available now in the shop, or you can read it for free on the Life With Girls blog.

One last shop update for the day. It's Watercolor Wednesday! Today, we have this handsome corgi pup, and cozy coupe. These are both original watercolor and ink drawings that are also available as part of the story starter chip set.

Thanks for stopping in! Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Have A Doctor Who Year!

With the year drawing to a close, a lot of people are thinking about time. Thinking about time inevitably leads me to thinking about the Doctor. Doctor Who, you ask? Exactly! Ha-ha-ha!  One of the great things about being a freelance artist and crafter, is that sometimes people ask you to make really cool things. Towards the end of this year, I had the opportunity to make several cool Doctor Who Items, and now that Christmas is over I can finally share them with you!

My friend Carter was looking for something to give to his wife for Christmas other than the usual Jewelry, so he asked for the Tenth Doctor (Played by David Tennant) in an illustration acting as Hamlet giving the speech to the skull of Yorick.  I was familiar with the fact that Tennant had performed Hamlet before, but hadn't actually seen it before. So I looked it up on YouTube. I'm not sure whether the whole thing is available there or not, but I was able to watch several scenes, and it was a very good update on the classic play. This illustration was a lot of fun to do, and I look forward to doing some more like it in the new year.

I think, looking at my work, that it must be obvious that I'm a child of the eighties. The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) will always be my doctor, when I think about the series. He's the one that I watched with my brother on Sunday afternoons, hanging over the side of my mom's bed. Over the summer, I'd made a few Doctor Who Peg People as I was trying out some new things for new products. In the fall, one of my friends bought the four that I'd made (Ten, a Cyberman, the Empty Child, and Rose Tyler) and asked me to make 9 more and three play houses to go with them. Her only stipulation was that they all had to be Doctor Who characters and buildings. WOW! It was a lot of fun picking the characters that I wanted to make into peg people, and an interesting challenge translating them and the buildings to this simplified play format. It also allowed me to come up with certain "rules" for the construction of the houses and the details of them, which I may not have ever done with just working from my head.

  

Amy's House

  

Martha Jones, Amy Pond, Eleven, and Rory Williams

 

The Tardis

 

 The Silence, Vashta Nerada, and a Weeping Angel

 

Dalek

We hope you all had a wonderful 2012, and that the worst day of the New Year is better than the best day of the last one. Until next time, take care and be good.

Your friend,

Jeffrey

The 30 Day Post-It Challenge

So, what to people who draw (or do any creative thing) for a living do in their free time? They create more stuff. Just like athletes have to constantly train to play harder and better, artists constantly create to sharpen their minds, try out new ideas, or just get rid of bad ones. During the month of November, I participated in the 30 day Post-It Sketch challenge. It was a lot of fun, I think I grew some over the month, and it was great getting daily feedback from friends and family on instagram and facebook. As you can see, I didn't quite make it to 30, that's because I got a little behind and a new daily project needed my attention for the month of December. More on that in a minute though, for now, here's my 30...er 25 Post-It sketches.

 

 December is busy with the holidays, commissions, and more work...and the girls. To re-start the Daily Life series as Life With Girls, I'm doing some journal-style comics in a small, 30(ish) page sketchbook for The Sketchbook Project. The girls are really excited about Christmas, making things and seeing people, and we'd like to record some of that and share it with our friends.
Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Working on Commissions...

I'm getting caught up on my commission backlog, which is great, and still making progress (albeit ridiculously slow progress) on my personal project...which is also great. A couple of people asked on the Facebook Page this week when the Fairy Tale book will be done. The best answer I have right now is soon...hopefully before Christmas. I hate sounding wishy-washy like that, but I SWEAR I'm working on it. :) At any rate, I don't really have time for a big post, but it's been three(ish) weeks since I checked in so I thought I'd better.

Plus I promised my instagram followers some zombies.

 Four zombies going after a meal in Saint Louis. This is a marker sketch commission from Archon this year. I had a lot of fun working on it. Zombies aren't usually my thing really, so these ones look kind of like Muppet zombies to me.

 Lando Calrissian. Another commission from Archon for a local home-brewer that likes to use Star Wars themed labels.

The finished Jack and the Beanstalk illustration.

Okay, that's it for now! This weekend, I will be at the Lindbergh Craft Fair at Lindbergh High School here in Saint Louis. It's a big show, and a lot of my friends will be there too. If you attend, be sure to stop by and say hi!

Until next time, take care and be good.
Your friend,
Jeffrey

I Say It Every Year...

Every year, I say I'm going to start my big personal projects earlier...I'm going to finish them earlier...Every. Year. Then, I spend most of September through November apologizing for having too much other work to get it done, and I feel like I look like a flake here on the blog. Enough of the apologizing for now, though. I want to show you all some of what I've been working on, and I also have a couple of progress shots (in varying stages of doneness) from the calendar to show you.

 

We do a lot of shows, and I spend part of the time there working on small commissions like these drawings and coloring in marker. They're quick(ish), fun, and something that I can do on the go. Most of these were done a couple of weeks ago at the Archon St Louis Sci-fi/Fantasy and gaming convention in Collinsville, IL.

 

One of my recent larger commissions was for a gift from a bride to her groom. Apparently, he'd proposed to her in a haunted house, so it was only fitting that they be chased by zombies on their wedding day. Ha-ha-ha!

The inked crow from the Fox and the Crow story.

 

And the fox, in ink and color. 

And the color "flats" for the calendar illustration. I thought this story would work really well as a shadow puppet style illustration.

And finally, the inked characters for the "Emperors New Clothes" illustration. Ha-ha-ha!

Well, it's been great stopping for a minute to chat, but I have a ton of work on my desk, and it's not going to do itself. Until next time, take care and be good!
Your friend,
Jeffrey

Strange Folk Wrap Up

It was a super busy weekend...a super awesome weekend. We got to see tons of old friends, and make some new ones. One of the things I love most about doing shows is getting feedback on our work in the moment. This weekend was definitely good for us, reaffirming that just maybe we're on the right path. Awesome as it was...I forgot to take a single picture. I feel more than a little sheepish about this, because I really, REALLY wanted to share some of our experience with you all. Luckily, we have good friends, and they DID take some pics!

 

Our friend Beqi of Beqi Clothing got this one of Mrs Handmade and I setting up our tent on Saturday morning. We decided to add a third table, and change the way the gridwall was arranged, and I think this is our best set up to date.

  

And the finished set up. :)

 

Karen from Binx Ceramic stopped by and got this photo of me and the new playhouses I made for the weekend.  Karen's always so funny and fun, it was great seeing her.

 

And finally, some of the loot that I left the show with. Clockwise from the top: "Out of the Woods" Limited edition printed shadow box by Sadly Harmless. Ragdoll and plush fox by Riley Construction. Soap by Buddah Body and Bath. Carlton the Cutesy Vampire necklace by Morbid Unicorn. And Sammy the Soda painting by my friend Alecia's daughter. 

It was a fantastic weekend, and I'm still recovering. There's lots of work still on my desk though, so no time to take a day off!

 

In other awesome news, "The Brave Little Tailor" as retold by Brandon S Graham with illustrations and layout by me is in a show on the fifth floor of the Columbia College Library, in Chicago. The opening reception will take place on Oct 5th, from 5-8 pm.
624 South Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60607
I hope some of you can make it!  I've made the layouts available on the Downloads page of my website as well, so you all can check out a little of the book progress. I'll have more big news on that front next week.

Until then, take care and be good!

Your friend,

Jeffrey

Little Houses on the Hillside...Crafting Strangefolk

Last year when were deciding what we wanted to be when we grew up, Mrs Handmade and I went to a lot of craft shows and festivals, testing the waters of the indie-craft scene. In late September, we went to the Strangefolk Festival in O'fallon Il. We were hooked. I wrote about the show afterwards, and remember how excited I was about it. Shows were definately something we wanted to do, and Strangefolk was at the top of our list. With the festival coming up this weekend, I've apparently decided to test the limits of "mind over matter" as I stay up doing client work, working on the Handmade Tales book, and getting new product ready for the show...Building a little neighborhood of little houses and people, in fact.

These little handmade playhouses started out life as a doodle on my desk blotter and have grown into these. There are two types, above are the Deluxe version where the face is painted, and the interior has a chalk board paint coating so that kids can customize their inner playhouse.

 

There's also the anywhere version with both faces painted with chalkboard paint to allow for maximum versatility in scenario location. I'm really excited to show these this weekend, and will be adding them to our online shop as well after the festival. 

 

In other news Brandon Graham, who I collaborated with on the Brave Little Tailor story in the Handmade Tales book has printed out the spreads of his story and my artwork to be included in a show in Chicago. How awesome is that? Next week, in conjunction with that I will post that layout here, as well as a downloadable pdf with the preorders for the book in our online shop...but more on that later. :)

Until next week then, take care and be good!

Your friend, 

Jeffrey

The Brave Little Tailor: Illustration Process

When I started this years big personal project, I knew it was going to be a lot of work...and boy was I right. As I'm nearing completion though, I'm really pleased with how it's all coming out. It's been really rewarding on so many levels. The friend's I've made, collaborating with writers, not to mention I have a large new body of work rolling out for the winter shows. One of the things I really like about doing these special yearly projects though, is seeing how the work changes from year to year, thinking about how the family has grown, and all the new things we do and are capable of doing. I'm really lucky to be able to do the things we do, and am so happy to share it with you all.

Today, I have a large set of images to share for the first complete calendar image. Showcasing the climactic scene of "The Brave Little Tailor", the idea is that the kids and us are acting out each of the stories in a theater setting. As I've been designing these, I feel like our love of the muppets and puppetry are really showing, and I'm reminded of one of the reasons I began drawing in the first place. In high school, I wanted to be a puppeteer and work in the Henson Creature shop. At any rate, This is my basic process for creating an image. I hope you enjoy it!

I started off with the thumbnails at the right of the page (the full size version is at the top of the post), and then rough in the major forms. I'm working at about 9x12 on bristol board.

Next, I pencil in the details of the characters, and firm up some of my ideas for the background.

Then, I ink the main characters and scan them into the computer. Without the background.

 

I put the background together in illustrator, right on top of the original pencil drawing. I also paint in a base color for the characters to help isolate them and unify their color schemes.

Here I put the final calendar layout over everything to make sure it all fits. I add a texture to the page, as well as paper textures to the background elements. I lay down color on all the foreground elements quickly to give everything a base to start from.

 The Characters are painted.

 Here I added some details to the background like the stage floor, shadows cast by the set, and the theater spotlight.

 And last I went in and added some detail to the set pieces, finished up the floor and added some sheep to fill in some dead spaces.

Thanks for stopping in. I hope this all made some kind of sense. I enjoy posting about process, so I hope you all enjoy reading about it. Ha-ha-ha!  If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear from you. 

Until next time, take care and be good!

Your friend,

Jeffrey