I have the COOLEST family ever!!

You might have noticed that my header picture changed last week...

All my siblings are artists, they are amazing and so talented!

Ben, can draw and play guitar, he is VERY funny and has a beautiful, fun wife and four gorgeous daughters. You can see their blog HERE.

Tyler, is a professional artist and illustrator. He is AMAZING! Check out his stuff HERE and HERE. Oh, and the picture of the Panda Bear in the Mountains... It is hanging on MY wall in MY living room! Tyler's wife is also a fabulous artists with her work in a studio in Park City UT. Check her work out HERE.

Katie, is still in college working on her degree in Art. She is also an accomplished potter and works her summers doing renaissance festivals selling her pottery. She has a beautiful daughter and is getting married this fall.

Anna, paints and draws and has more talent in her pinkie finger than I do in my entire body! I have 2 STUNNING portraits in my living room of my oldest children that I would grab only second to the kids if there was a fire! You can see her pieces HERE. Jeff, Anna's husband is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, that is why this picture (scroll to the last picture) of him is sooooo funny!

Whitney, and her cool husband live in Rexburg and are both still in college. Whitney can draw but her real talent is First Aid. She is a first responder and during hurricane Rita, Whitney, as a teenager, set up and managed shelters for thousands of people trapped on the highways outside of Houston trying to flee from the hurricane. It was a disaster and this girl was on top of it! I would send you to her blog but I think it is private...

Back to my header! My brother Tyler took the original picture and made it into a cartoon, this is how he did it....

Let's see, the details of my painting. Hmm, I started with thumbnails (tiny drawings, about 2x3 inches or smaller) in my sketchbook.  I use thumbnails for brainstorming.  Once I had some ideas that I liked, I did larger more detailed sketches, scanned them and emailed those to you to see which one you liked the best.  Once you told me which one you liked, I then used tracing paper to help arrange the elements of the picture for a nice compostion.  I also printed off picture of you and the kids from your blog so I had something to work with.  I traced you and Rush to make sure I had the proporitions right.  I scanned in my drawing, put in it in Photoshop and started painting. Since you were in the forground and I wanted you to have the most detail, so I used the a tool photoshop to trace vector lines around you and Rush so I could give you the crisp black outline that looks like it was inked.  Then I used my drawing of the other kids to outline them on one layer in Photoshop, and I colored underneath the outline layer on another layer, so the black lines stay on top. When I paint in Photoshop, I end up quite a few layers. There were layers for skin tones, clothing colors, outlines, hair, grass, text, sky, and the cardboard box.  Useing differnt layers let you organize the painting and makes editing really easy, say if a shirt was the wrong color, I wouldn't have to go back and risk painting over something else in the project, I could just work on the layer the shirt color. After it was all painted to my high level of scrutinany I saved it and then saved a websized version for your blog.  Then I just emailed off and away it went, out into cyberspace. That's pretty much it in a nutshell.  The part that took the longest was coloring the image.

 Cool Huh!

Anyway, thank you Tyler, you are AWESOME and I LOVE all you guys and your awesome selves!

Do you like the new header??