(We interrupt this blogging silence with a short plug for my hubby‘s latest comic effort)

Meet Iris Able, the smartest kid in MacGuffin Plains. She has an encyclopedic knowledge about science, technology and math that it seems she has the entire internet in her head. But because she keeps to herself a lot, the other kids in school don’t know much about her and have resorted to calling her Private Iris.

Private Iris, masterminded by Jamie Bautista and Arnold Arre¹, is a mystery comic series that challenges kids of all ages to match wits with the brilliant but secretive super sleuth, Private Iris. When Danton, the most popular boy in school, joins forces with Iris, the most intelligent loner in town, you get a crime-solving team that can’t be beat! Get to know more about Iris, Danton, and the rest of the MacGuffin Plains gang by visiting their flashy new headquarters on the world wide web right here.²

The Private Iris team

Hope you can check it out, friends. I can promise that it’s a really cute, very well thought-out book and I am sure that kids will love it³. The launch is slated for next Saturday, April 19 at Fully Booked in Bonifacio High Street. Please visit the Private Iris site for details.

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I’m touched that this blog still gets hits despite my sporadic updating. I’ve actually been up to a lot of things since my last post but I’m still up to my ears with work on our next issue among other projects so I’ll save the stories for later. For now, I’ll see you on Twitter or Tumblr. 🙂

1. the same team behind Cast[ back]
2. You gotta see the site! It’s really cool![ back]
3. Call me biased but I can tell you that Jamie’s tight story and witty dialogue and Arn’s hilarious illustrations always gel so well together. You’ll see for yourself when you read Iris. 🙂[ back]

I was on a roll so I just *had to* make a few more:
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“Summer’s Child”; “Preppy in Pink”
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“Scooter Sister”; “Lazy Daisy”
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“Easy Breezy”; “Pup Princess”
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They’re already at my Cafepress and Printfection stores and it would mean a lot to me if you could help spread the word about them. 🙂
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On Cafepress at The Paper Basket
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On Printfection. PF actually has a wider selection of t-shirt styles and colors so opening a store there as well seemed like a good idea.
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Since I’m already pimping like crazy here, might as well go the whole nine yards and urge you to check out my new merch at Poptastic, including this design based on a quote from a popular late 2007 movie:

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A pile of to-dos for the next issue of our mag has crept up on me so I can’t stay long. Meanwhile, let me leave you with a playlist¹ I made to go with the girly illustrations I just bombarded you with. Cheerio. 🙂

1. Click on the link if the music player takes too long to load.[ back]

Last week when I was organizing my workspace, I found some of my raggedy old sketchbooks¹ and suddenly got a burst of inspiration to pick up a pencil and draw for no specific reason — not for a job requirement and not for anything other than fun. I’ve been trained² to sit in front of the computer and work, work, work for so long that I was concerned that I didn’t know how to draw in freewheeling fashion anymore; you know, draw without having to think if it’s “marketable”, “on-strat”, or “what the client wants”. I’m the “client” in this case. My Arn³, the true artist in the household, says that sketching is just like riding a bike⁴ — once the ability is in you, it’ll always be in you — and that one should never overthink what he or she doodles.
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Armed with that thought, I sat down and came up with the following. Don’t ask me why I decided to draw cutesy girls in nippy weather wear, that’s just what came out. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Swedish pop?
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“Jumper Girl”; “Scarfed Sweetie”
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“Kitten-Smitten”; “Mittened Miss”
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“Bohemian Belle”; “Pleated Posh”
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And because I’m ever the multi-tasker, I just had to slap the illustrations onto some items over at my shop The Paper Basket so do feel free to spread the love and purchase a tee or two if you like. 🙂
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Clickety here.
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Now to prove that I never really stop working, here’s a real project. Lori of Dessert Comes First, one of my favorite food blogs, recently asked me to design headers for her website using photos that she took. The food shots were gorgeous so I made a simple template to allow the images to do the “talking”.
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Yummy, huh? The fourth one is my favorite – photo and layout-wise.
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Fortunately she liked 5 of the 6 studies I submitted so I suggested that maybe she can ask her programmer to make them all load randomly each time the page refreshes, kind of like what I did for my friend Tippi‘s site. I’m happy to see that it’s now being implemented. 🙂

1. Back from when I was a college freshman so hello, that was 20 years ago![ back]
2. By my OC self. There’s no one else to blame, really.[ back]
3. He’s the other way around, he churns out illustrations like they’re liquid.[ back]
4. Yet another activity I haven’t done in years. Let’s see if that metaphor is true… [ back]