It is amazing how having a baby can suddenly suck up any spare time you had, right? Especially if that baby is a super-colicky, fretful thing than won’t hardly nap during the day or sleep longer than 2 hour stretches in the night… Good think he is freakin’ adorable! By some miracle, I have also found a few moments here and there to get my creative juices flowing again! Here are a few things I have been able to work on.

Easter is always a good opportunity to get some portraits of the kids. Link is 6 months old now, and everyone keeps telling me “Oh, he’ll grow out of the crying phase soon enough…” Sigh. While I wish he’d outgrow this fussy stage, I can’t stand how quickly my little baby is getting so big! Even though he has his hard moments, he has the sweetest, heartiest laugh that somehow makes me forget how tough these last months have been. Not to mention little Pen has been an angel child, helping me out so much every day.

Penny just adores her little Lincoln. It’s like they go together like, well, the Lincoln on the Penny. Har har. (The correlation between those names were not intentional BTW, it just happened…) Jeff and I thought up super hero names for them just in case they decide to team up one day and bring evil to justice. Obviously an illustration followed!

The most adorably dangerous thing to ever face evil, right!?

Penny will sometimes request coloring pages for me to draw. Her request this time was a depiction of her super alter ego. Well, we had to throw Link in there too. She was quite satisfied with the result. The coloring pages were created in Adobe Illustrator with a custom brush I created.
“Come on, Hyper Link! No time to waste when evil is on the loose!” “aGooooo.”

With all these super cartoony drawings as of recent, I wanted to try to draw something a little less stylized. Having just taken some Easter pictures of the two kids, I thought that would be an appropriate subject for my project. I sketched them out in the Sketchbook Express program, then finished coloring them in photoshop. They still turned out a little cartoonish, but I was satisfied with the result overall. Realism has never been my strongest suit anyway.

Here’s another fun little gem. Having a name like Lincoln lends itself to all sorts of fun projects (I have many Halloween costumes lined up for this kid already)! This past Presidents Day I thought it would be awesome to pay tribute to one particular prez. Can you guess who? Those $1 suspenders were one of the best snags from the thrift store ever!

Recently I felt it high time that I get one of those fancy shmancy smart phones. My old flippy wasn’t quite working out for me any more. Jeff and I both got iphones, and I have been enjoying it QUITE a lot, just for the couponing apps alone (another hobby of mine is scoping out crazy deals and sales). But the little white phone looked so naked and vulnerable so I decided to design a case for it. Using my artist discount and taking advantage of a sale going on at my society6 shop, I designed and printed a case for my phone. It turned out SO great! The society6 iphone cases are great! They are made strong and of quality material, and the print job was pristine. Every time I pull out my phone, I love seeing my little 8-bit family on there.

While enjoying an extended helpcation (half vacation, half a desperate trip to get much needed help with a baby who likes to cry a lot) my mom was working hard on her latest hobby, starting her own Little Free Library!  Building her own adorable little library was definitely worthy of a matching logo. Together we came up with a little something to stick on bookmarks, stickers, flyers, etc. Blue Hill refers to our blue-painted house that sits atop a little hill on the bottom of Wedgewood Drive. Now I am just trying to convince mom to really paint her front door yellow.
    We ordered sticker to put on all her books, and they turned out SO lovely. Oh, how I enjoy seeing my work in print.
  Check out her blog that she created to go along with her library: http://www.bluehillbooks.blogspot.com

And for my final project! Every time one of Penny’s friends has a birthday, I am so worried about present-repeating. You know, someone else gives the exact same thing as you? I also hate doing a cop out gift, like candy or bubbles, which I am very guilty of doing. I finally came up with something that I know no one else will have guaranteed! A coloring page of the birthday child!

Penny had a party for her friend Melody coming up, and since it was Frozen themed and she had just gotten back from Disneyworld we thought it would be fun to draw her decked out in Elsa fashions. I printed this out, and gave a sketchbook and a array of coloring medium to go with it. I gave her a few extra copies and sent her mom a jpeg for printing at her leisure. I think she liked it!
Here’s a picture of everything together.So there’s an update on my recent projects. Sure, life is a lot more busy with a new kid around, but a good kind of crazy. Plus it would seem that this little guy has inspired most of the artwork! Way to inspire mommy, Link!

(All artwork and photos on this site belong to me. Please do not use these with out permission.)