A New Year and NEW theme on Illustration Friday

This is not my traditional New Year's post. I'll do that along with some sketches of two new book projects I'm excited to be working on later in the week. For the moment this is sharing some new sketches from the last few days of 2012. We spent some time with the Fabulous Illustrator's brother and family and I did these sketches for the nieces while watching one of the MANY kid's movies floating around as gifts this year.

First, the princess/fairy loving one: I have a lot of experience with what makes little princess girls happy since I have one of those regularly underfoot - specifically lots of ruffles, lots of hair, lots of frills and at least one wand:

Second the dragon loving one: I have some experience with this kind of little girl as well since I was a dragon lover much more than a princess fan. In my memory big gnarly fierce dragons were the best and we liked to be able to boss them around:

Finally the preteen. Eleven year olds are much more cool these days than I ever was. Preteen Niece appears to have attained the same level of coolness at 11 that I reached at about 19 so I couldn't draw pictures of dragons and horses for her. Instead I noticed she spent a lot of time with the pets at Grandmama's house. I do remember being caught in the age between relating to little kids and relating to grown-ups. During that time, when there were no other in-betweens around, the company of animals was preferred: