🍁🍂Second Sundays Harvest Edition 2024 🍂🍁

Happy Harvest Season Peeps!

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve done a general update so I thought I’d give a summary of my experiences with Lightbox Expo, this most recent Inktober challenge, and what’s going on in the world of me during November. So let’s hop in!

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Lightbox Expo

For those not familiar, Lightbox Expo is the largest artist-only convention that’s hosted in California every year. Industry professionals from all over the world gather to share their knowledge, foster the art community, and sell their wares (oh the amount of pure awesomeness my eyes did see!) Think of it like a comicon, but strictly focused on artists. I’d attended online in 2020 and 2021, so I was jazzed to go in person this year.

So how was it? In a word - awesome! It was busy and exhausting in the best way with five days of travel, panels, visiting and buying things from artists in the exhibition hall, and for the first time for me - attempting to network. 😶I’m actually really proud of myself for handing out a small number of business cards (five to be precise!) and everyone I talked to - both exhibitors and attendees - was so incredibly kind, welcoming, and sincere. I learned just as much from these small conversations as I did from the panels.

Top Highlights

• meeting Crash McCreery - as a MAJOR Jurassic Park nerd, I’m embarrassed to say it took until listening to him speak at a creature design panel to figure out why I knew his name. He was probably the only person I was really “star-struck” by at the convention, but when I met him at his booth he was the most down-to-earth, genuine, and warm person. Getting to shake his hand was such a big deal to me that it didn’t even really sink in until later that day who I’d just talked to. Still geeked out over it! 🤓

  
  

• Devin Elle Kurtz’s panel - Devin is one my favorite artists and on her social media she has always been so gracious about sharing her process and offering free tools and resources to fellow artists. Sitting in on her panel felt almost like a one-on-one conversation of picking her brain for an hour. I definitely took the most notes during her panel. (see below - and apologies for the handwriting. 😅)

• Exhibitor Hall and in-line conversations - seriously, just talking to other artists, being surrounded by so much amazing talent, and feeling the warm camaraderie was food for my soul. This is the primary reason I want to go back to Lightbox again.

  
  

• The architecture! Maybe an odd one, but my friend and I were obsessed with the hotel neighborhood’s architecture and the enormous trees and lampposts that dotted our walk every day. 😍

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Inktober 2024

The challenge this year saw the return of book dragons! Like last year, I picked 4 of the 31 prompts to do one book dragon per week, and it turned out really well. Drawing these dragons has become a way for me to experiment with shape and style and just feel really loose with my illustrations. It also stretches my creative muscles by not only designing a dragon around that prompt but also trying to find a book that either has the word in the title or is at least related, and bringing the book and dragon together. And of course, it feeds the very large book nerd side of my brain. 😉

Here they are!

I’ve also gathered all of the dragons from this year and last year and created a new printable coloring book! Putting these coloring collections together has become another new tradition that gives a second life to my artwork and it brings me joy to see others really take them into their own imaginations. The coloring book is up on my Etsy shop for anyone interested!

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Looking Ahead to the Rest of November

Over the next 3-ish weeks here are creative projects I have lined up:

• I’ll be doing another book dragon series, this time inspired by the Folktale Week prompts. I’ll be attempting to do all 7! I’ll also be making these into their own coloring pack when they’re done. So lots more bookwyrms coming!

• the Cup of Tea book blog coming on Sunday

That’ll do it for now! I hope everyone is having a good harvest season so far, and in case anyone needs it, this is both your reminder and permission to take time for yourself and eat that food, read that book, watch that show, get cozy with your fur baby, take that walk, sing and dance to that song. Take care of you! 🥰