The children’s book, Welcome to Monster Isle, which I illustrated, has won the 2009 Bookbuilders West award for Best Children’s Book Cover in their 39th Annual Book Show!

The award ceremony took place on January 27, 2010 at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. BookBuilders West celebrates the best of Western book design, manufacturing and the advancement of “Green” publishing. So this is a wonderful award for my publisher, Immedium, as well.

View the Monster Isle website

Buy the Monster Isle book at Amazon

Above is a piece of art created for the Beautiful Grim Art Auction, an auction put together by fellow illustrator, Daarken, and animator, Lief Jeffers, with the purpose of raising money for Daarken’s girlfriend, who has a lot of medical bills due to her fight against breast cancer. Please visit the Beautiful Grim website to learn more about Cat, as well as the auction. And please consider either donating some money or purchasing a piece of art from the auction once it goes live next year. There are close to 200 artists contributing to the auction, a testament to the love and good hearts of so many talented individuals in our industry. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a piece of art you’d love to buy.

The piece I created, entitled “Blood Flower”, will be an 18″x18″ print, signed and remarked with an original drawing. The print will be custom framed. Daarken plans to put together a gallery showing of all the art as well, so please check the Beautiful Grim website for details and updates.

I am happy to announce that “Welcome to Monster Isle” is now online in digital form through a very innovative and exciting website, astorybeforebed.com, which has partnered with my publisher, Immedium, Inc.

astorybeforebed.com allows anyone with a webcam to record themselves reading a book from their online library, page by page. The user can then purchase their reading of the book and share the link with friends, family, or whoever. Like a picture-in-picture feature on television, the recipient can then see the video of you reading the book, along with the actual book on screen. Check out the site and view the demo. It is pretty cool!

The website also offers discounts to men and women serving in the United States Armed Forces.

For a direct link to the Monster Isle book, click here.

Hey everyone,

A buddy of mine has a chance to have his children’s book, JUMP!, put into boxes of Cheerios in 2010 and needs our help to cast votes for him. Let’s do what we can to help make sure fans of Cheerios become fans of Scott! You can vote once per day and there are only a few days left. The top five books will get into Cheerios boxes.

Most of you that enjoy my work will no doubt be aware of Scott’s work. We both cut our teeth in the fantasy industry working on Magic, D&D, etc.

Vote for Scott’s book here.

This is video of my daughter Antonia speed skating in the 500 meters, along with one of her teammates, Michael — and opening the Olympic Qualifiers at the Pettit National Ice Center. At big events, such as this Olympic qualifier, they usually have young skaters forerunning, ie, skating a distance so officials can test the clocks. Antonia wasn’t required to go all out during the race, but apparently she did and ended up skating a personal best. I’m very proud of her!

Above is an illustration of a King Cobra done for Ferdy Christant over at Jungle Dragon. I’m illustrating a series of twelve animals and insects for the Jungle Dragon website. I’ll share more of them as I get them done.

Also, this evening my kids had some of their art on the walls of a local library as part of an art exhibit through their homeschool group. You may notice that Antonia did a pencil drawing of a King Cobra. It was a fun evening of viewing art from all the students. Corina did a really cool drawing of Wonder Woman, while Armando did an interesting painting of a house using only two colors.