Folio Academy

Will Terry, a buddy of mine, and Wayne Andreason, a guy I don't actually know, just launched a pretty cool website: folioacademy.com

It's an instructional site with art tutorials on a wide variety of subjects.  There are already a bunch of cool videos up on the site and they add more all the time.

Cool stuff.

Brotique Week

Upcoming event in Kids Books.  It's gonna be great.

So, if you're going to be in the Provo area come check us (my critique group) out at one or all of these many cool activities.

BYU Writing and Illustrating For Young Readers Conference

Last week I attended the BYU WIFYR (Writing and Illustrating For Young Readers) Conference.  It was fantastic.

The conference runs for a week and it is intense.  I took the weeklong workshop with Dandi Mackall who is a prolific author.  We workshopped picture book manuscripts in a 15 person group each morning from 8:30-12:30 Mon - Fri.  I learned a ton from Dandi, especially about Point of View and getting in the character's head.  Dandi's website can be found here.  She's got some great books.  I'll make some recommendations on good books later.  (Also, Dandi is a sweetheart.)

I got to talk to Martha Mihalick, an editor from Greenwillow Books (an imprint of Harper Collins.)  She gave me some great feedback on a book dummy I'm working on.  She was great.  She helped me fix some big problems with the story and get it more focussed.

The conference is organized by two local authors (as far as I know) who are hilarious and make the whole thing a lot of fun.  They are Carol Lynch Williams and Cheri Pray Earl.  They are great and their books are great too.

If anybody is considering going into children's lit, either writing or illustrating, the BYU WIFYR conference is an invaluable resource of information and a great place to make connections.

At the end of the week I drew Will Terry (one of the presenters) as a lumberjack.

Will Terry is a Cool Dude

And he has a cool name.

So this guy named Will Terry came in to one of my classes to do a painting demo the other day. The demo was great and as it turns out Will is really cool too.

You can check out his work here.

You can see the demo that he did here.

Anyhow, I sketched Will during the demo. You can find that below.


I love making new art friends.