Warm-up drawing: The Apple of Discord

Todays' warm-up topic was "apple" so I drew the Golden Apple of Eris.

 

As you all of course know, Eris was the goddess of Discord, who, miffed at not being invited to a wedding, showed up anyway and threw her golden apple to the ground, shouting "To the fairest". Now this was a pretty fancy wedding, so many of the Olympians were present. I chose to depict the exact awkward moment when Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, each believing themselves to be the fairest of them all, all simultaneously reached for the Golden Apple of Discord. One thing leads to another, and this little incident eventually lead to the Trojan War and the more-or-less complete destruction of the race of Heroes.

Progress Report Hades: Finished Color Page

I'm beginning the final step in coloring on Olympians Book 4, Hades: I Forgot the New Subtitle. That means lots of finished pages! Here's one-- the first view we get of the titular god himself.

The Divine Twins vs. The Wonder Twins

As I do from time to time, I share appropriate warm up sketches I draw with my friends here on the Olympians Rule blog. Today our topic was "twins", so I drew everyone's favorite twin deities, Apollo and Artemis, vs. the old cartoon superheroes the Wonder Twins.

Apollo and Artemis won.

You win some, you lose some...

Well, the preliminary list is up, and it looks like Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess didn't make the ALA's Notable Children's Book List for 2011. A disappointment to be sure, but one slightly mitigated by Zeus: King of the Gods making Yalsa's Great Graphic Novels for Teens list this morning.

Athena has been nominated for the 2011 ALA Notable Book List!

The last such of these posts I'll put up today, I promise, but this is some very exciting news for me! The American Library Association, the oldest and largest library association in the world, puts out a yearly list of Notable Books and Athena: Grey-Eyed Goddess is in the running! That's some exciting, exciting news for yours truly. Check out the full list here; Athena is nominated in the non-fiction Folklore category.

The ALA is holding their Midwinter Meeting in sunny San Diego this weekend, and everybody who's everybody in kids books will be there (well, except me, I'll be in frigid NYC). All of the shortlisted books will be read and evaluated by the committee members, and the final list will be released on Monday, January 10th. I hope Athena makes it on!

Athena is a Cybil award finalist! Keep your fingers crossed!

The Cybils (The Childrens' and Young Adult Blogger Literary Awards) recently announced the finalists for their 2010 awards and Athena: Grey Eyed Goddess is on the middle-grade graphic novels list! This is an amazing honor, made more so by the fact that I'm in some pretty serious competition with a host of my favorite graphic novelists, like Raina Telgemeier,  Aaron Renier, and Colleen AF Venable ( In her other life as First Second's Book Designer par excellence, Colleen also designed Athena! Small world!).

As the above are also some of my favorite people, I consider it to be an honor just to nominated amongst such terrific company, and will be happy no matter who wins, BUT... I will say this. The actual winner of the Cybils gets an amazing engraved pen, and, man, I would LOOOVE that pen :).

If I am lucky enough to win the Cybil, man, I do hereby vow to draw some pretty pictures with that pen.

Zeus wins a blue ribbon from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books!

A lot of cool news piled up while I was recovering recently, and this was amongst the coolest.

The venerable Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books  (or BCCB for short) recently released their list of 2010 "Blue Ribbon" books and Zeus: King of the Gods was on it! This is a great honor, and I'm pleased as heck to be on the list with so many great and talented authors. Give a  click over and see what else got a blue ribbon.

Warm up: red and black

So, first off, apologies for my long absence from Olympiansrule-- I've been crazy sick for crazy long. Feeling better though!

As I've mentioned here occasionally before, along with a bunch of other comics artists I know, every Monday thru Friday we choose a topic to  draw a warm-up picture on. I don't normally post these drawings to the Olympiansrule blog because they normally are unrelated to Olympians, but every once in a while my solution is something that might interest you loyal mythophiles. The first thing I thought of when I heard today's topic of "Red and Black" was checkers; the second thing I thought of was ancient Greek vase painting. Put the two together and...