Category Archive

If you’re carving it in stone…

We have a hiking boot birdhouse (see top inset) that has attracted house wrens every summer since we first hung it a few years ago. It’s just in the shape of a boot (child-size), so I’m not entirely sure what’s attracting them. This spring, we successfully hatched (and launched) a full nest, and within days of their departure, the nest was being rebuilt and, apparently, …

When I want to feel like an incompetent, underworked artist, I visit Keri Smith’s Web site.

Here’s another illustration that I redrew in graphite for the book. Originally, he was created specifically for greeting cards back in 2006, and these two images are the before and after shots. He looks very different (I’ve learned a lot) and, I think, very improved.

Some of the illustrations I’ll be adding to the book I decided to redraw so everything will look consistent. The first do-over I posted back in March was called “Bombs Away.” The illustration I drew for the “Humpty” story in the book actually started a few years ago with the illustration you see at right, on top. I just drew it in pencil one day …

I finished the first of several signs I’ll be working on for a Mexican Restaurant located inside Westmoreland Mall. Their name is Madres Mexican, and they specialize in build-your-own orders. This one will be 96″x30″ when it’s biggie-sized. Yeah. Pretty big file.

I’ve been keeping track of Gris Grimly’s career since I happened to find his book Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Madness in our local Barnes & Noble a few years back. He’s a prolific illustrator. I’m not sure how else to describe his work. He’s incredibly gifted and has determined ideas of how his books should look. I’m …

I finished the fifth page of “The T-Rex and the Hare” graphic novel for the book, and I’ve uploaded it to the Hairy Eyeballs site. This one has a bit of a fantasy sequence on the part of Rex. Roll over the button that looks like the image here to see the full page. Seventy-six pages complete!

I’m thinking this wasn’t the neighbor’s cat. We found two similar piles within a few yards of each other in our front yard. The second one was close to a line of empty (except for the leftover dirt) potted plant containers which were lined up along a wall of our small outdoor building. A couple of the containers had been tipped …

As you may have seen at the top of this blog, I’ll be changing over to a professional newsletter generator beginning this month. When I first started sending newsletters, I used the generator that CafePress made available to shop owners, but over the past year or so I’ve gotten a little fed up with their system. Using their interface was …

After much hair pulling, I think I finally have the bugs worked out of my latest site page upload. As I drew the illustration for Cleaver Overachiever, I scanned the image in as I went along. Then I did some aligning (the best I could) and made an animation of the progress. This link will take you directly to the animation …

I think I forgot to mention it here before, but I try to keep my different art lives separate so as not to frighten the children. I’ve built a Web site that has the links to all of them though, and it’s here: www.nornie.com. If you’re old enough and you can handle the shock, you can take a look at …