Christmas Tree Farm -- Illustrations for a Children's Magazine

Here are illustrations completed this week for the December issue of Sparkle magazine - a children's magazine for young girls ages 6-10.  The illustrations are created with a gouache under-painting and pastel Prismacolor pencils and Artstix.

Sketches of these illustrations can be seen by visiting the post on my art blog here.

Creating a Turkey Illustration for Sparkle Magazine

As an artist/illustrator it is enjoyable to paint art for a children's magazine called Sparkle. Here is an illustration completed for a full-page spread in the November issue, under-painting in gouache with pastel pencils/Prismacolor pencils/sticks.

For a more in-depth view showing the process from thumbnail to finish, please visit my blog post here.

Abolitionists, a Series of Colored Pencil Images by Amy Lindenberger

In the course of developing my main body of work devoted to Civil War-era Americans, last year I created two 16" x 20" images, one of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the image above of John Brown. This past October marked the 150th anniversary of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, VA (present-day WV) and much to my surprise and pleasure, I was contacted by the United States Marine Corps for permission to use this image on the cover of the Fall issue of their military history magazine, Fortitudine.

Since that time I've been working on a few images of Frederick Douglass; the one I'm posting here is a very straight-forward rendering of Douglass in his later years, done in graphite with a light tint of colored pencil, on a 12"x 12" Gessobord. The photograph I'm showing here was really of very poor quality, and as a result I had to Photoshop the background somewhat to try to recreate what was actually there -- but it gives you at least an idea of what the original looks like.

Currently I'm working on a much larger -- 24" x 24" -- image of Douglass, using Prismacolor Artstix (a colored pencil product that looks similar to pastels but consists of large sticks of the same material that's in a colored pencil lead) and a bit of solvent. This piece is much more dramatic and shows Douglass at a younger age, and at a time in his life when the fight for the abolition of slavery was not yet won. I'll be posting the final version on DPP, probably sometime next week, but you can see the in-progress stages on my blog at http://amylindenberger.blogspot.com/.

To see more of my Civil War-themed work, please visit http://www.civilwarfineart.com/.

To see my other work or learn about workshops, please visit http://www.amylindenberger.com/.