I recently completed a short series for Menno Media for their Shine curriculum. This series illustrates 9 scenes from the life of Jesus Christ. This first one shows Jesus and Mary in attendance at a wedding feast. I believe this is the one at Cana where he turns water to wine.
A wide view of the team’s first game for the picture book project I just finished. The text for this page fits in the white space over the bleachers on the left side. This image gives you a good view of the logo I designed for the Jackrabbits. This image took longer than you’d think because, even though the people are tiny figures there are 28 of them and most of them had to be drawn and colored consistently with the depictions of those same characters on other pages. Uniforms do save time on coloring, though.
Here’s the 6th illustration for the book project I just finished for Learning A-Z. Page 8 of The Neighborhood’s Night by Juliana Catherine.
Here Leena’s family makes it to the emergency shelter, which is the gymnasium at a school a safe distance from the wildfires. The important points of this illustration are to show the three families standing in line at the front, that they’re in a gym, and that there’s a crowd of people already there. Since I didn’t want the crowd to make the background too busy and distract from the foreground people, I made them fade from minimally colored at the front, to completely gray at the back. The color in the room also fades a bit as it recedes into the distance.
It was important to the client that I show diverse families, because they wanted to show that all sorts of people had been displaced by the wildfire. That’s why, in addition to Leena’s family, one family group consists of two women and a child and the other has a little grandmother and her grandkids, including one in in a wheelchair. The characters are a bit small to really show racial traits, but they do have a range of skin tones and hair color to indicate diversity. They also are diverse in the amount of stuff they managed to bring with them, either by affluence or by luck, it isn’t clear. One family group has several nice, big, rolling suitcases while Leena’s family just has some duffle bags and the third family doesn’t have any bags at all.
Here’s the eighth image for a graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. Mom for City Council by Jessica Malordy.
Here’s the fourth image for a graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. Mom for City Council by Jessica Malordy.
Here’s the ninth of thirteen images.
Standing Up to the Bullies by Ashley Kazery, commissioned by Learning A-Z, illustrated by me.
[Edit: I’ve updated the image. This is the final they’re using for the book.]
Here’s a silly picture of robots reading in a bookshop cafe. I liked the idea of something so digital-age as a robot doing something so analog as reading from a paper book.
It was fun to design all the different kinds of robots. I almost drew it with all sorts of movie/TV robots instead. You know, brainbots, cybermen, C-3PO, Wall-E, etc. But I think I had more fun making up my own.
Not sure if you can tell at this resolution, but this cafe serves oil, batteries, memory sticks, CD’s, and the odd bit of hardware as robot snacks.
Here’s a close-up of the counter.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 