Inking Practice

I'm working on a coat of arms for the (amazing imho!) Portland-based band Floater and had some time to kill while waiting for the "Green Light" to begin working on the final design. I love to do warm-up pieces in general especially if I'm about to start a final piece of art. And working on what my mind perceives to be a "real" piece in between waiting to hear back from a client is tough (for crazy ol' me at least, unless it's going to be more than a few hours, in which case I'm fine) because I'm too distracted wanting to know if they're going to want another rough or will give the go ahead. I've got to get over this, like, right NOW, and be able to shift from one project to the other while waiting for approval because I've got plenty to keep me busy! But at the same time, a little warming-up is never a bad thing! (right? anybody...?)

So anyhow, here's a piece I worked on to warm up for the "House of Floater" coat of arms (just so you know, this is NOT a reflection of any of the subject-matter in the coat of arms :) On this one I pretty much just started drawing with the pen nib and didn't stop to correct anything until I was done. It's always very satisfactory when it flows out without any real screw-ups and also is a great confidence-booster before starting a more methodical finished piece.

By the way, Floater will be playing at Bumbershoot this weekend & if you're lucky enough to be there, make sure you do NOT miss them as they are simply AMAZING live!

Once the finished piece is done and the band has given me the A-OK I'll post it here.

A HUGE announcement, SCBWI, Comic-Con Int’l, and a website update (sheesh!)

First off, after you finish reading this post, please go to my website at www.jimdibartolo.com to check out my re-designed site and updated artwork sections. There’re still a couple things that go to the old site for now, but I’ll be updating those soon too. Here’s what the homepage looks like now:

Now onto the HUGE announcement. Both Laini and I have dropped a couple of hints here and there over the past few months or so regarding a project that we’re working on, or calling it top secret or some such. It’s also the item I have listed in my Blogger profile where I say I’m “creating art for another collaborative book effort.” Well, that book was a collection of short stories Laini had written about a year ago (initially they were entries for the site she and our friend Meg had created called Sunday Scribblings, but Laini expanded and revised them into longer stories. After I read the new versions of them months ago we started talking about the longtime dream we had of creating illustrated novels like those that used to exist decades and decades ago. So with these amazing stories fresh in my mind, I took some time developing a slightly more stylized look to the art that I thought would best accompany the worlds Laini had created. After creating about 5 pages of samples that we both felt really liked, we handed them over to the agent we share and she took them out into the world.

Anyhow, the FANTASTIC news is that we can finally announce that the book WILL be published by Arthur Levine’s Scholastic Books imprint!! I won’t go into details about who Arthur Levine is other than to say that he oversees some AMAZING (and amazingly famous) books and we are THRILLED to have the opportunity to be working with him and the rest of the folks at his imprint and Scholastic Books! THRILLED I say! Since some of the concepts for the book will be nailed out soon as well as the art style and such, I'll update more as it develops.

We also had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time with Arthur at the recent Summer SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) Conference a couple weeks ago and had a fantastic time getting to know him. To add to the great time, we were able to meet (and pester!) Rachel Griffiths, his former Associate Editor, but now an editor herself at Scholastic Press, and the always friendly and warm Elizabeth Parisi (the Executive Art Director for Scholastic and Arthur’s imprint). Geez (!) what a bunch of great people! Here are an assortment of pix of us with Arthur and Rachel at lunch (with our agent) as well as some including Elizabeth and Rachel. As Laini pointed out on her blog, don’t the two of us look like a couple of toothy goombahs?!

And speaking of great people, Laini and I also had the always fun opportunity to spend time with her Dreamdark editor at Penguin/Putnam, Tim Travaglini when we were at the San Diego Comic-Con. Tim and his marketing staff (and Laini) had helped organize a panel that Laini and 9 other fantasy authors were on to discuss creating, writing about, and the importance of: villains! What a fun panel, and I was SO proud of my wife! What a pro in front of 400+ folks! After the panel, she signed copies of her book. The next day, we both had the honor of signing in the shared Penguin/Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore booth. We had a pretty solid turnout, they raffled off my artwork (one print and one original (see previous post)) and I sketched a bit in some people’s books (the pressure to not screw up almost paralyzes me every time! :) Here’re some pics of us with the SO generous and SO fun Tim Travaglini, a pic from Laini on the "villains" panel, the signing on Saturday, and dinner with Tim on Friday night after the con closed for the day (our agent and the Penguin marketing ladies were also there, check out Laini's blog for more dinner pics). (P.S. - thanks for the bow-tie tutorial Tim! :)

I’ll post more pics from the conventions soon (I hope!).

Thanks for stopping by!

Be well,
Jim

Aim for the head

In my daily stop at Fuse #8's blog (aka - Betsy Bird), she had a great banner like the one below to take a Zombie Apocalypse survival test. Being a gigantic nerd for stuff like this AND very skilled with a hand gun (* see below) I decided to take the test being as honest as possible.

*

Here's my score:

54%

BUT, if I cheat and answer how I think they want to hear, I did much better:

97%

So, while my 54% score may be an "F" in the real world, I choose to look at it more optimistically and say that I have a slightly better than 50/50 chance of surviving the Zombie Apocalypse. Or, I could become a cold-hearted b@$!@*d and only have a 3% chance of dying! A proud day indeed for ol' Jimbo :) Laini also took the test and while she's looking at the results in a glass half empty perspective, dammit she made me proud!

Art, guns, and pie

Here's a clipping/detail of a piece I just finished. The whole piece will be posted on my website when I do the update (soon, I promise! (or soon-ish actually :) I'll also put more of the step-by-step piece up soon too.

Hope you all had a great 4th! Laini and I had her parents, one of their friends, our rad niece Izzy (with whom I had a looooooong watergun fight with. Note to self: 11 year-old girls are better shots than you think they would be...), and a couple of neighbors over for a simple BBQ and teeny fireworks demo. Great fun. Laini and I also collaborated on a low-fat pie/fruit tart for dessert using the graham cracker crust recipe I altered from the pie cookbook her sweet Mom gave me for my last birthday. Here're a few pics (please excuse the dead lawn -- we just can't justify using all the water it'd take to keep it alive during the summer. It looked nice until about 3 weeks ago I swear!)

2 Anniversaries in 1

Here we are celebrating six years of marriage AND 8 years & 8 months together which land on the very same day :) Nerdy to know that I suppose, BUT I DON'T CARE! :)

Laini's wearing one of my gifts to her -- a necklace -- and I'm wearing one of the gifts she gave me, an AWESOME t-shirt by Fyasko (one of my favorite t-shirt brands).

Here's to 60 more anniversaries together baby!

Podcast from Tacoma WLMA Speeches

So, I've figured out how to convert and host our speeches from the above (and previously) referenced Tacoma WLMA dinner last Thursday evening!! While the sound quality is mostly pretty solid, there are some warbles here and there (and some loud paper shuffling sounds a few times).

Laini talks for the about 35 minutes reading from a fantastic speech she wrote for the event followed by me winging it for about 7 minutes thereafter. Just click here. Enjoy!

Tacoma WLMA

Laini and I drove up to Tacoma yesterday to speak at the annual dinner meet and greet with authors and/or illustrators held by the Tacoma WLMA (Washington Library Media Association). This year they were kind enough to invite us to join them and speak about our lives, careers, and the creation of Laini's upcoming book. While the book is definitely Laini's baby and her creation, it was an honor to be involved in the book itself as well as to be invited to participate in the event. We met so many wonderful librarians and teachers from the Tacoma area that when we drove home late last night, we mostly kept restating to one another how much fun we'd had. So if anyone reading this was at the event last night, thank you (!) for making the evening so enjoyable :)

Here are some more pics. First from outside of the coastline restaurant where the event was held:


Then, one with our driving companion before he went back to guard/rest in the car:


And a few more (Laini speaking, me speaking, and both of us signing):




We recorded our speeches at the event and if I can figure out the technology, I'll post a link or some such so everyone can hear our talks. Wish me luck! :)

Jim

Catching up

This was the promo banner for a gathering Laini and I were honored enough to be a part of last week. After finishing the Rex Mundi issue I was doing for Dark Horse, I prepared a short presentation about the "Inside Story" of creating the artwork for Laini's book "Faeries of Dreamdark." The gathering was organized by the Western Washington SCBWI and hosted by the very sweet and talented Jaime Temairik.

Below are some pics of recent happenings that I've been too darn busy to post about. The arrival of advance hardcover copies of Laini's book complete with my wraparound jacket (!!), some birthday pics (one with Laini's mom), and a belly-dancer at a local Moroccan restaurant (it's okay, it's Laini's dollar and she was the one taking the picture :)


Some pix from our brief trip to an alpaca farm in Hood River when my mom came to visit these past few days (plus another b-day straggler photo). Aren't alpaca's freakily weird looking?




Oh (!) and a picture too fun not to share (me an my lovely and amazing Mom and some fantastic cupcakes from St. Cupcake here in Portland! :)



In a bizarre reminder of how small our world can be sometimes, when that last pic of me at the waterfall was taken, a guy walked by that I KNEW I knew from somewhere. He said "CCAC?" (the art school I went to in San Francisco) -- turns out we had a painting class together about 7 years ago and he and his wife just moved to Portland 3 months ago after having lived in NY for a few years. So, they moved to Portland and just happened to be at the waterfall about 40 minutes outside of town when we were. SCREWY!!!

Lastly, I'm starting to lay out a complete website re-design. I'm not positive when it'll be done, but I'll post a note here once it is.

Rex Mundi #6 finished samplings!

It's been a while since my last post but it's not been for a lack of working! :) I've been doing pretty much nothing but working on the fill-in issue for the Dark Horse comic "Rex Mundi" (pencils, inks, coloring all by yours truly) since I last posted and while it was a TON of work, it was also a lot of fun, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. If all goes smoothly it should be out close to the end of next month and available at all fine comic book stores nationwide (although requesting a pre-order from your local store never hurts to ensure that they order it! :)

Anyhow, here are some panel samplings at random:




Now I've got some reading, movies, and friendships to catch up on before getting to work on my next project (news of which will be coming soon!).

Oh, and anyone who's got a Netflix account (because I don't know if you can rent it at your local video store) check out "MI: 5" -- it's a BBC spy show and it's FANTASTIC! We're up to the middle of season 4 and it's so unique in it's feeling of reality (no James Bond gadgets, no Alias flying sidekicks while wearing a pink wig -- although I'm not snobby about any of that stuff either!). Check it out!

Jim

Rex Mundi #6 art samplings

Here are 2 images (one from a finished panel and one from a panel in progress) from Rex Mundi issue #6 from Dark Horse Comics. Fun stuff to be working on and I'm about to get started on the climax of the story (where things get really creepy and good! :)

Ooh! And a new episode of "The Office" is on tonight!

Peace!
Jim

Rex Mundi #6 cover and a small panel sample

Here's the full cover to issue #6 (I'd posted the girl running a while back but now that solicitations are out I figure it's safe to post the whole thing...). And here's a panel from inside the book featuring the same little girl-- what's she peeping on through the keyhole? ...

New art! New kitchen! Hot???

Hey, it's been a while eh? Sorry about that! I'm hard at work on the upcoming fill-in issue of Rex Mundi I'm doing with Dark Horse Comics and some vampire gaming cards for White Wolf Publishing, but I managed to squeeze in a few color cover roughs for a project that I was approached about last week (but I sadly didn't land the gig -- too bad, it would have been fun! But it was a great experience regardless, so no harm done!). Anyhow, while I don't think I can say what it was for, I think I can show you the roughs I did (they're at varying stages, the first at a more complete (yet still unfinished) stage, and the other 2 much looser). Anyhow, blah de blah, here they are:





I've also been doing some illustrations for a book of short stories by my beloved. Here's a close-close-up detail snip-it of one of the illos:



Also, the talented husband of our awesome friend (blog and otherwise) Jennifer has been working on remodeling our kitchen! He's been doing an AMAZING job and it's almost done. Man o man has his handiness been a Godsend to us! :)



We had initially wanted some pattern for the floor, but once we saw how lame the selections were and then saw the checkerboard (!!) it was like the decision was made FOR us! We LoOOOoooOOOOooove it! (if you disagree, send your complaints and opinionated rants here)

And lastly, Laini pointed this VERY flattering post out to me on the hugely popular Fuse #8 site. I'd like to say that I'm humbled by her kind words, but since I'm so "hot" it's hard for me to reflect inward like that (what with all of the mirrors in our house, how can I make time to ponder my own humility? I'm too busy being "hot!" -- yeah right! :) Thanks for the kind (and skewed!) words Betsy! You're being VERY generous there, but thanks for the inclusion :)

I'll try to be better about updating more regularly here. I'll see what I can do about posting some vampires & the like as I work on them.

Peace!
Jim

Irons in the Fire

This piece is a cropping from something I finished last weekend. I'm not sure if I can post the whole piece at this point or even say what it's from, but I wanted to put up some new work. Suffice it to say that she's running for a good reason (all I can say is that it's from something that we hope only goes bump in the night in reality -- oooh, creepy!). I'll post the whole thing at a later time.

Back to work on a different project from the one above -- it's something near and dear, and I'll post some snippits of that work here when I feel the time is right. Lots of excitement brewing in me wee brain about it though! :)

Cheers

A.L.A. Conference and Amazon.com

Laini and I were invited to the A.L.A. Mid-Winter Conference by her publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, and her editor Tim Travaglini and we just arrived home from a FANTASTIC couple of days. The conference was in Seattle (which we LOVE) and the experience was just amazing. We had the pleasure of meeting so many generous, kind-hearted people -- from librarians (the "L" in A.L.A.), to Editors, to Art Directors, to Marketing, and on and on). It was an insider's event (with thousands of people) with limited attendance by authors and illustrators and we were thrilled to have been invited! (thanks Tim! :)

The event began for us on Friday when Laini had the honor of giving a presentation about "The Rise of Fantasy in a Post 9/11 World." She was up there with two amazing and prolific authors, R.A. Salvatore and Timothy Zahn, and they couldn't have been nicer guys! Laini had prepared a speech that she read to me on the drive up (making me get teary-eyed in about 1 minute as it covered topics like war, heroes in fantasy and the real world, her childhood, her family, and the question of whether or not we can ever have a "golden age" in our world's future).



After the three of them presented to a crowd of about 500 librarians from around the country (with some editors and marketing folk in the audience as well), we went back to the Penguin/Putnam booth where Laini autographed Advance Reader's Copies of her novel (which I did the jacket and interior illustrations for!).



While Laini was signing (and hearing about how others that heard her speech got teary-eyed!) I snapped a few pictures and then got a chance to mingle with some other editors from within Penguin as well as other publishing houses (and what a great bunch of people!).

So in addition to seeing people we've come to know and become friends with from attending other conferences (hi Mark!, hi Sara and Jaime!), we got to meet a bunch of new fantastic people that I hope we'll be able to see again soon at other gatherings.

What a great couple of days!

And here's the book amidst other recent and upcoming Penguin/Putnam releases:



Oh, and to top it all off, we got home and out of curiousity checked on Amazon.com and voila! my jacket artwork is on the site!! (sorry for all the exclamation points on this post)

Now I'm off to bed, then an early morning as I get back to work on the cover I'm doing for Dark Horse Comics! Very exciting as well and cause for one last exclamation point! I'll post the finished cover soon (as long as it's okay with my editor)

Jim

Happy New Year!

I need to catch up on posting some of the art I've said I would put here sometime soon, but for now I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! Wow, 2007 is just about here. Sheesh!!

A new project coming up on the "maybe/maybe not" pile, one on the "probably" pile, and one on the "yes" pile. Man o MAN I'm excited to be working on all of these (and I'm hoping they ALL come through!). For now, here's an inked and almost done colored panel from an ongoing personal project of mine that my brain won't let me drop for too long. Sigh, where's that "Time-Stoppage Superpower" that Laini and I are always pining for? :)

Be safe & see you in the new year!

Jim

Insomania art weekend = AWESOME!

With the holiday prep and my wonderful (!!) mom visiting I don't have much time to put up a post (which is an EASY trade-off), but I couldn't let TOO much time go before posting SOMEthing about my weekend in San Francisco and the inspiration I found by attending the "Insomania" artist workshop/conference put on by the amazing guys and gals at Massive Black Studios and the Concept Art message boards.

The painting above is a piece I did during one of the life model sessions (this took about 45 mins). There were countless models all weekend but I mainly went to the digital workshops. I'll post more next week, but for now, here's a link to some AMAZING photography by Phil Holland.

Late Night experiments

About to turn in for the night, but I've been messing with these new practice ink pieces I did an hour ago. A bit of paint, a bit of digital texture, a bunch of messing about. Both're a bit creepy, but I dig them nonetheless. Will I feel different about them after a nights sleep ... or will I make one of them my new signature/profile pic? Hmmm. Maybe neither. Maybe both?

Comic Books?

I have the good fortune to know a number of creative people who create any number of things. From books, to collage art, to fine art oil paintings, to recycled sweater purses, to bottle cap jewelry, to any number of things, including comic books. Of the latter, I'm friends with people at all steps of the creation of any comic: writers, pencillers, inkers, flatters, colorists, editors, and publishers. And while I bowed out (on VERY good terms) of the artistic duties on one of my favorite comic books of ALL time (the recently Johnny Depp optioned REX MUNDI), I know that I want to return, at times, for varying lengths of time, to the world of comic books. And after lunch with a friend of mine the other day who's in the comics world, I might possibly be returning briefly to making comics. The possibility of this has inspired me these past couple of days to draw a couple of pages from a story I've been writing off and on for the past year. I've been doing these mostly as a mental warm up to what I might be working on briefly sometime soon and I've got to admit it to myself: I really enjoy drawing action sequences! (it's the nerdy boy in me no doubt!). Okay, so these pages will hopefully SOMEday be more than a warm up as I really think there's a great story to be told, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So, here's one of the pages I drew over the past couple days (still incomplete as I'll be adding some more background characters tonight):


And here are a couple of details from that page:



I'll post the other page soon. I'll also post more definitive information as/if things are confirmed.

This all comes at a time when I'm getting a strong creative hankering to work on some art for a story I just finished reading. Maybe it'll be something that'll be published somewhere, who knows. Anyhow, my creative interest is piqued in several different directions (a recurring theme for me), so I should be getting back to the ol' drafting table.

Cheers! And happy creating to all those talented people out there who might be reading this!

P.S. - Heck, as long as I'm geeking about comics & such, here're a few sketches I did a while ago for Captain America and Madman:

Dreamdark advance copies!

We just received these from the publisher a few days ago and while it's exciting to see them like this, I can't wait to see the hard cover version complete with wraparound book jacket and embossed foil lettering!

Sigh, gotta wait almost 7 more months for those!

Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone!

Jim

Website Updated!

The site has new work in all of the galleries with the exception of the "Sequentials" gallery (although that may change shortly...)

Thanks for stopping by!