“Liam and Quinn” a New Story

As I warned you before, I’m not just working on nature sketches, beautiful landscapes and interesting portraits, but lately have been concentrating on my children’s stories and poems. I’ve been writing them for years but never have settled down to concentrate on illustrating them, until NOW!

I have many, many characters to create that are in my head, but need to come to paper with pen and paint. They’ll get born eventually, I have to start somewhere and it’s with my two newest pals.

I’d like to introduce you to my little friends, Liam and Quinn. They are actual teddy bears that I named after my two newest nephew’s, don’t they have the greatest names? They (the teddy bears!) were made years ago from my own pattern design when we were sewing bears to donate to Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. I say ‘we’ because I had a charity sewing club where high school students earned community credit by sewing the bears (from donated fabrics) and the younger kids would make the felt vests and decorate them with paint and glitter. It was fabulous fun and the kids all learned about creating for other children, just wonderful! Maybe I should write a book about that and put patterns in it? Ok, ok…one thing at a time!

Liam color sketch, three quarter view

This is Liam, the younger of the two bears, his face is shaped a little different and his eyes, nose and mouth are different from his brother.

Liam sketch front view

He is a little smaller than his brother Quinn, but that’s not surprising.

Liam color head study, what a cutie!

Here’s a study of Liam’s friendly face and what cute ears! The most obvious difference is Liam is yellow orange and Quinn is blue.

Quinn sketch front view

This is Quinn! I love drawing him because he’s a bit more rounded, has a bigger nose and big smile! I still need to paint him so you can see his wonderful blue color and purple vest.

Quinn thinking sketch

Here Quinn is thinking about something his little brother said, I really like this pose.

Quinn pointing up sketch

This is from the part of the poem where he points up to the top of the toy pile.

Quinn climbing the toy pile sketch

And here I’m trying to animate my little friend using my imagination to show how it would look if he climbed up the toy pile.

And now I’ll leave you with the first two stanzas as I go to work on painting Quinn and work on my storyboard!

“Liam and Quinn”

This is Liam
and this is Quinn,
and where do you suppose
my story shall begin?

I’ll start at the top
and work my way through
and end at the bottom,
as all stories do.

…to be continued!