This is kind of uncomfortable since we haven't talked in so long, but I have good reasons. I've had some pretty major life changes since the last post.

We bought a house! Not just any house, but the house we hope to stay in for a long, long time. We bought this house knowing it needed a lot of fixing up, so we've been really busy with projects large and small to make it into our home.


To make things more complicated, I was pregnant with our second child when we bought the house and moved. That little boy has since been born (dramatically, during the worst blizzard Baltimore has seen in 20 years!) and is now almost 9 months old. Yep, it's been that long since I posted last. Welcome, Remy!

 
Just a couple of days before Remy was born, I was commissioned to illustrate another book for the Folio Society, who are my absolute favorite client. I might have turned it down due to the terrible timing, but the book was Jane Austen's Persuasion, a novel I'd already read and loved. The next few months, illustrating a book with a newborn and a toddler while also returning to teach were some of the most exhausting I've experienced, but worth it.



My second born is also a horrible sleeper and we've been subsisting on 3-4 hrs of broken sleep a night for the last 6 months.


So, this poor little blog has fallen by the wayside. I've still been updating instagram with personal photos and sketches and pinterest with inspiration images from time to time. Earlier this week, I received my published copies of Persuasion and today I'm finally able to share images from it, so I figured it's time to dust this little blog off again.

Over the next week, I'll be posting final illustrations, roughs, and process images from the book, as well as a bunch of other stuff!

I just finished this portrait illustration tonight for an upcoming tribute exhibition to Maurice Sendak at the Baltimore Enoch Pratt Central Library. The show will also feature some of Sendak's original drawings! We've been reading lots of Sendak books to Sebastian lately - Where the Wild Things Are and Bumble-Ardy are favorites, so I'm excited to be a part of this. The exhibit will run from Oct. 6 - January on the 2nd floor of the library. If you're close by, you should check it out!