Christmas Book by Alan Anderson

A week ago, just before I got bitten by the flu bugs, this book arrived in the mail: The Christmas Sleigh. It is a very special book because the writer and illustrator is Alan Anderson, my brother in law!

I don't get often the chance to visit my sister and her family in the US, but every time I am there, Alan will be sitting with a sketchbook on his lap and drawing, drawing, drawing. I think he needs it as much as we all humans need water...
It is no wonder that he is incredible talented by hard work and practise. No wonder that he finally took a leap of faith and published his first book! Wow!

When I heard about it, I wondered how I could get my hands on a copy. And lo and behold, it was already available from the bookdepository.co.uk website - the website that I always use for ordering books since they do free shipping (all around the world) and has no additional costs for small orders.
Within 2 weeks the book had arrived and I felt that I needed to do something special with it. I took some photographs today and put them together into a little video to post on YouTube (and Vimeo and Flickr and uhhh Facebook....).

My apologies for the music, but I felt that I could not send out a video about christmas into cyberspace without any sound! :-)
I am just so incredible proud of this man, and of his book. The illustrations are so wonderful and I love the way he used colour in parts of the picture to attract the main attention and the background, still with all the thoughtful details, in shades of grey. And then the expression on the faces of the characters...

Though I am in the process of trying to sketch (almost) every day, I know that I will never achieve the level of art that he has achieved. But at least I can thoroughly enjoy it now with this book. Just wonder how I could get him to sign the book since he lives on the other side of the big ocean... LOL

Patience

Fresh Colour To Brighten Up Grey Days

Everyday, I receive an email from http://www.design-seeds.com/ in my emailbox with new colour palettes. It always feel like a kind of gift that you get to open: beautiful pictures with a palette of colours attached to it, chosen from the photograph.

Here is one I made myself. I loaded a photograph of the Little Guide Book into Photoshop and made this palette of colours myself. The colours in the photograph might not be as bright as they appear in the palette, but who said that I have to constrain myself to the exact colours? :-)
Just a little bit moving the cursor around in the Colour Picker of Photoshop and I got this beautiful bright set of colours.

Just what you need on these grey, dab days... Hope that these colours will make you smile today as well!