A Big Day for Me

My first published children's book, Asiago is now on pre-sale through Amazon.com. View it here! It's a really strange and wonderful feeling-- I began working on the book in September 2009, and here we are at year's end in 2011 and it's available on Amazon.

Here's the first drawing I ever did off Asiago, before he was tailored to fit a children's story and he was just a little guy wearing and old-fashioned bathing suit living in my notebook:

And here's where we ended up:

To everyone who's been following along with The Daily Graphite this past year and a half: thanks so much for sticking with me. This project means a lot to me and I look forward to sharing more and more art as we venture into 2012.

-A

The Back of the Book!

Slowly but surely, I'm putting up more and more drawings from my first published book, "Asiago." It will be available this coming spring. Really quite a trip for me; if you go back to some of my first posts, you'll see that I began sketching for it over a year ago. Now I'm eagerly anticipating the finished and printed book to hit shelves.

Asiago

Coming Spring, 2012:

Pencil vs. Photoshop

Image one is in colored pencil. Image two is in digital color. Who wins?

Asiago Preview

Just posted a sneak peek video!

FIFTY-TWO

Asiago trying out a beach towel cape:

FIFTY-ONE

For the fans of post nineteen. I've done a color study of Asiago, sick from eating the garlic baked clams. Gross.

FORTY-SEVEN

This is page two from my book. You'll have to imagine this post and the last one next to each other, on the same spread. Asiago has pretty much been taking over my life, so I hope you enjoy him and his antics.

Click to enlarge greatly!

FORTY-SIX

Page one from my book, Asiago.

Click to enlarge greatly!

FORTY-TWO

As promised, here is the colored version. Tomorrow I'll post the facing page!

FORTY-ONE

You might remember an almost identical drawing of a vampire and his friend from post #11.

I'm happy to announce and lucky enough to have found representation from a literary agent in helping me shop the Asiago project to an editor. But in doing so, I had to tighten some things up in my drawings- a challenge I took pretty seriously. Let me know what you think of the changes, and visit tomorrow, where I'll post this same thing colored in!