Dani Jones (@DaniDraws) & The Illustrated Section (@IlloSection)

A wonderful site and blog to check out: DaniDraws.com. Children's illustrator Dani Jones has posted a ton of fantastic tutorials, tips and much more for illustrators on her site. See her category links near the bottom of her main page.

Dani also recently launched THE ILLUSTRATED SECTION, an online store selling digital work (comics, picture books, art books, instructional, more) by illustrators. If you're interested in selling your work here, please read the submission guidelines.

Kidlitart recently interviewed Dani in a Twitter chat; see the transcript here.

Video: Emily Gravett Drawing Workshop

A fascinating peek into how Emily Gravett works.

Wow, I love the way she uses that Wacom tablet. I have a 6" x 8" tablet, but now I'm lusting after hers. Thanks to Tracy Bishop and Loni Edwards for the link.

Marietta Zacker giving away illustration critiques (WriteOnCon prize draw)

Quickie heads-up, Marietta Zacker of Nancy Gallt Literary is giving away a personal illustration critique as part of WriteOnCon's promotional prize draw. To enter, post a comment over on WriteOnCon's blog post about the giveaway.

Marietta's bio:

Marietta has professionally experienced every aspect of children’s books for over 15 years, working with authors, illustrators, publishers, educators and readers.  As an agent at Nancy Gallt Literary Agency, she is passionate about bringing those worlds together.  She represents authors whose work make her pause, shiver or laugh out loud and illustrators who add a completely different dimension to the story being told.  Marietta approaches her work with the knowledge that there are remarkable books of all genres, targeted to all ages, just waiting to be discovered. Aside from her work as an agent she is also the Book Curator at Sparkhouse, an independent toy store & bookstore in South Orange, NJ.

WriteOnCon is a virtual convention for writers, coming August 16-18, 2011.

Taking Mentorship Advice: my revamped business cards

One of the pieces of advice I received at my mentorship sessions last year was that I needed to revamp my business cards. As in I really REALLY needed to revamp my business cards.

Here are my old cards:

I used MOO to do these cards, which I admit to putting together at the last minute. For the front of each card, I had one of my Inkygirl.com comics for writers. On the back, I had the image you see in the bottom right, with my name, contact info, websites, etc.

While writers tended to like the cards because of the cartoons, they (the cards, not the writers) are graphically WAY too busy.

In fact, Cecilia Yung (Art Director of Penguin) said that when she looked at my card near the end of the judging process, she had to go back to look at my portfolio to remind herself about WHY she had picked me for the Mentorship Program.

Eek.

Anyway, my graphic designer friend Ray Vankleef from One Trick Pony helped me revamp my card design (thanks, Ray!). And I admit that I did find it a challenge to include so much WHITE SPACE. The writer part of my brain kept screaming, "What a waste! You could be including more information!" But I resisted.

Here's the revamped card:

Thank you, Ray!

When I went to meet with Cecilia at Penguin last month, she told me she was so proud of me. :-D

What about the rest of you? Did you design your own cards or get help? Feel free to post samples of your own cards.

What gets an kidlit art postcard tossed IMMEDIATELY? Advice from Victoria Jamieson

Post by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

I recently joined Pixel Shavings, a small group of children's illustrators and writers, and we're about to do out a postcard mailing. I've never done a mailing before so I'm excited and curious about the process.

As I started doing some research, I came across a wonderful post by Victoria Jamieson in the #kidlitart archives about what made her immediately discard artist postcards when she worked for children's book publishers. Her reasons for immediate rejection were basically:

1) too editorial

2) too mass market

3) too sci-fi

4) too weird

5) not telling a narrative story

Read Victoria's full post here: Get 'er done.