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School Visits
If you’re in charge of booking school visits with authors and illustrators, I would love to work with you! I’m also available for library, book store, and museum visits.
As a former teacher and a presenter at events for big people (Craftcation Conference, Type A Bloggers, Pooler Chamber of Commerce), I’ve got experience working with children and adults of all ages, and can collaborate with you on an author/illustrator visit that’s just right for your audience and needs. My school visits are lively and interactive, with lots of Q & A encouraged throughout!
I’m an illustrator in McDonough, Georgia with over 20 years of professional art and design experience. I’ve spent ten years of my career as an in-house artist at corporate offices including the OshKosh B’Gosh art department, along with 13 years of self employment as an artist and designer. I’ve illustrated the Magic Friends and Magic Jungle titles of Ooly’s Hidden Colors collection, the Little Silver Book and the Little Yellow Book for the National Association of Realtors, and the Dinosaur Daydreams series for Capstone Publishing. I’m also currently querying literary agents to get my first projects as an author/illustrator traditionally published!
Topic Ideas for School Visits
Careers in the Arts
Perfect for Career Day at your school! I can be prepared for 15-20 minute rotations or longer periods, whatever your career day schedule looks like. Through lively conversation, kids discover how they can use their own favorite ways to be an artist as jumping off points for careers in art and design, and along the way I share a variety of fun colorful visuals from my own 20+ years as a professional artist.
Onward and Upward! (A Talk About Resilience)
I graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in Computer Art (focusing on 2D animation) in 1999. And when I started looking for a job… congrats it’s all 3D animation now. Then I went blind in one eye in my early 20s. And was laid off from one of my artist jobs. It’s enough to bring anyone down, but not when you just won’t take no for an answer! I’d love to chat with your older students (4th grade and above) about what worked, what didn’t, and tips to help make their own career ambitions succeed. We’ll review highlights of some of the coolest things I’ve gotten to work on in the past chunk of years, talk about those hard times, and how to keep going in the meantime.
How it Works – Illustrating a Kids Book From Start to Finish
If you have an idea for a book you want to write and illustrate, where do you get started? If you didn’t write a book, how do you come up with the illustrations for it? I’ll bring tons of process work from the Dinosaur Daydreams series as well as my own picture books in progress – from Word Document and character development, to thumbnail sketches and cleaned up pencil drawings – that will give a clear picture on how the pictures come to life!
Art & Technology – Digital Painting BFFs
You provide a projector; I’ll bring my trusty iPad, Apple Pencil, and Procreate. Let’s introduce digital painting to your kids with a live demonstration! This fun interactive presentation will involve the audience art directing what I draw on the screen – schools that book multiple sessions of this presentation throughout the day will love seeing the variety in the finished pieces. Looking more for a getting started with Procreate session? We can do that, too!
Creativity Exercise – Just One More Thing…
This is a super popular group project that gets everyone involved in making art – even the reluctant ones! I’ll bring a variety of art supplies and a large canvas for each presentation. We’ll talk about the importance of having fun with art and play a round robin game resulting in an art collaboration everyone in the room has had a hand in creating. Hang it on the wall of your library or school to commemorate our time together!
Book ‘Em Danno – Let’s Make Journals
Nice sketchbooks and blank books are great, but sometimes it’s just not in the budget, especially for kids full of ideas! I’ll share why I need to spend a little time journaling every day – I’ll even bring some of my own homemade sketchbooks for kids to look through. Then we’ll all make simple blank books together, and spend some time drawing in them!
Rates for School Visits
School visits are billed at $300 a day, plus travel expenses for locations outside of Henry County, Georgia.
Book Sales for School Visits
Selling copies of the books I’ve worked on could be a great fundraiser for your school, and I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there!
Capstone Publishing offers schools a 50% discount off school / library prices of books with no minimum requirement, and will accept returns of any unused books. Teachers or librarians organizing school visits should NOT order online (as the 50% discount won’t apply). To order books for your school or library visit, call Capstone Publishing’s customer service to place your order for the event by calling (800) 747-4992 or emailing customerservice@capstonepub.com .
Be sure to remind Customer Service that this is for an author visit to get the 50% off discount, and place your order at least 3 weeks before my visit. You’ll also need to be ready with the book titles and ISBNs you want to purchase, along with quantity, shipping information, and where you would like the invoice sent (or credit card info).
