Saturday, December 25, 2021

The Egg Beaters

Hello again everyone, merry Christmas to you all. Today I finished the last complete illustration for a book I have written. The Egg Beaters is a heavily illustrated chapter book about some chickens playing baseball. I got the original idea about 10 years ago when I was hired to create a poster for a friend. The poster was a birthday present for her cousin who loved baseball and chickens. As I drew, and then painted the poster I contemplated the characters, and dreamed up a story for them. That story was the nucleus for The Egg Beaters.

I was very busy at that time as a new dad, and transitioning into a stay at home parent, so I did not sit down and start writing until a year or so later. I did some character drawings to cement the concept in my brain, then set the project aside so I could complete a picture book project The Daydreamer. From time to time I would come back to The Egg Beaters, write another piece of the story, or do some character/location sketches.

With much help from the ladies in my writers group, and much grace from my wife I completed the story and all of the rough drawings two years ago. Then I began the final drawings. Having those drawings to work on over the 2020 summer was truly a blessing. The kids played in the sprinkler and I sat in a lawn chair in the shade and escaped the pandemic one drawing at a time. At over 120 pages and almost 200 illustrations it is easy to see why it took me 2 years to do the final drawings, working in my spare time. Today I finished the last final drawing. I will need to do some fixes, mostly computer work, or adding a character to an existing drawing, but it is pretty much done now. The next step is to combine the word docs into one giant pdf and get it printed, then send those to agents.

This pencil sketch was done with a Pentel .7mm P207 mechanical pencil in a Pentalic Sketchbook on 70lb paper. I hope you enjoyed this post, and that it encouraged you, made you think, or challenged you. God bless, merry Christmas, and have a great day! --Ryan

Sunday, August 22, 2021

Sunday Sermon Series August, 2021

Hello again everyone. This week I have an illustration from Pastor Andrew's sermon on Psalm 2:1-12 entitled "Everything in One Thing". Here is a link to the sermon, which I highly recommend: Psalm 2:1-12

Nations raging, and people plotting in vain. boy, does that sound familiar. The world has been messed up since Adam and Eve. Our current world situation is not new. As I listened to the sermon I thought about applying this to myself. I have to admit it is way too easy for me to focus on the problems we are living though in our family, nation, and world, and to become discouraged. It happens more often than I would like. When that discouragement comes the only way that I have found to fight my way out is to turn my focus back to God. God loves us.

God has a plan for each of us. There will be suffering, but God is there with us, we just need to turn to him. I'm not as eloquent with words as Pastor Andrew, you should liten to the sermon to get the scoop. The big take away for me is that tagline: "The closer you are to the Word the harder the world is to see, and vice versa."

This drawing is pretty rough. Even though school is still out I find my free time is still in short supply. I was pretty happy with the Jesus character, but I didn't get the feet right on Cartoon Ryan. I hope you enjoyed this drawing, may God richly bless you my friend.<\p>