My Tomie de Paola Illustration Award Contest Entry

You may have noticed that my last post, yesterday's Illustration Friday, was a Christmas card image from 2011.  I drew and painted that just before Thanksgiving, over a year ago.  So I did not create a fresh "snow" picture.  I decided to slack off and post an old one.  

I have excuses. It's been a hectic week at the day job what with all the year-end donations to process and the  preparations for our annual holiday party.  I've put in a fair number of extra hours the past few weeks.  My daughter returned from college yesterday.  And on the weekends, I've been working on this:

This is my submission to the SCBWI's annual Tomie de Paola Illustration Award contest.  It's a scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, rendered in Photoshop using the scratchart method I've been trying to perfect recently.  The challenge was to illustrate a scene of your choosing from Tom Sawyer, Little Women, or The Yearling in black and white.  Since one of my goals is to illustrate middle grade novels, I thought I'd better enter the contest this year--you know--put myself out there.

If you'd like to see some of the other entries, take a look at the blog the SCBWI-Houston Illustrator Coordinator, Diandra Mae, set up: scbwicontest.blogspot.com.