One of my favorite events each year is the Holiday Art Show at my local comic shop, Carol & John’s. I’ve been contributing to the show for a few years, and my kids are able to donate their art as well!

Since 2013, Carol & John’s has organized their Holiday Art Show to help provide food security assistance for those in need. Submissions for the show are open to anyone willing to create art, specifically an original comic book cover on blank books that the shop provides. Everyone is able to try to win one of the donated cover art pieces in a basket raffle system. A dollar gets you one raffle ticket towards the cover of your choice. All proceeds go to The Greater Cleveland Food Bank, the largest hunger relief organization in Northeast Ohio. Last year, proceeds from the art show funded 18,888 meals. The lifetime total is 159,496 meals donated due to proceeds from the art shows.

Earlier this month, a stolen car was intentionally rammed into the front offices of the Food Bank, so this effort to help them out is especially timely.

Each year the art has a fun theme that the shop announces a few weeks ahead of time. Past themes have revolved around the pandemic, holiday movies, Marvel vs. DC, the Spider-Verse, and “What If?” This year’s theme asks artists to create a tribute to a classic comic book cover. Artists donate covers rendered in a variety of mediums, from crayons and markers to funny photoshops and digital art. It’s always a crazy mashup of comics lore, the holidays, pop culture, and Cleveland in jokes.

The aspect of the event that stands out to me is the all ages, everyone is welcome angle. An entire school class has even participated for the past few years. It’s delightful to see the kids’ art, and if my own kids are any indication, the opportunity to have art displayed in a real art show is a confidence boost and inspiration for young artists. It isn’t a “school” show, it’s unique and expands their community. Plus, they help raise money for a good cause. I love getting to collaborate with my kids, as they come up with their cover concept and title, and we mock up the type and fun “cover” graphics like the comics code stamp and vintage price tag.

I think my favorite cover my kids have created so far is “What If… Iron Man was a Frog?”

Carol & John’s puts in the work and turns neighboring retail space into a gallery for a few days, where everyone can enjoy the art and place their raffle tickets. Every donated cover is an obvious labor of love. There are extremely talented and experienced artists involved whose work hangs next to work from someone who might be participating in an art show for the first time. You can see students who have participated multiple times grow into their own year over year. Everyone brings a creative concept and all of the artwork earns money for charity.

The show runs from Wednesday the 18^th through Saturday the 21^st. If you are unable to visit the shop/gallery on Cleveland’s West Side, you can still view all the covers and call in with a credit card to buy raffle tickets. Each cover will have numbers assigned and the extremely sweet, helpful people at Carol & John’s will place tickets in any cover’s basket for you if you give them the number. Winners are going to be drawn live at their Holiday Party on the night of December 21^st!

These are just a handful of past covers for the show:

Illustrator Gina Perry is kind enough to organize this event exclusively on Bluesky and Cara.

Find out more at Gina Perry’s website.

Check out my #kidlitartpostcards

Check out all the great art being posted for #kidlitartpostcard day!

Illustrator Gina Perry is kind enough to organize this event exclusively on Bluesky and Cara.

Find out more at Gina Perry’s website.

Check out my #kidlitartpostcards

Check out all the great art being posted for #kidlitartpostcard day!

So I made a National Parks-style poster tribute to this simple bit of family fun.

Goofball is the youngest, and the most rambunctious. He wears dinosaur pajamas, likes climbing things and identifies as a monster (especially when it is close to bedtime). He’s ready for adventures at a moment’s notice, but can be very sensitive sometimes. He is susceptible to joining in the precocious plots his sister concocts.

One of my goals is to make characters that wouldn’t be too hard for a child to draw.

She is a pre-school kid who gets a little overstimulated and diabolical before bedtime, so I was inspired by the manic characters in old sugary cereal commercials when I was designing her. Her hair is a spiky, like spines and horns on a monster dinosaur. Her face is all eyes and mouth to make her extra expressive.

For this doodle, I used Procreate, which records your drawings in a time-lapse video. I use a syrupy black ink brush for her line work, because I want the humor and cartoony expressiveness of old newspaper comic strip characters, and I color her in using bits of pink/orange felt and flowery blue & yellow fabric I scanned, to make her appear as if she has really comfy pajamas on and give her a children’s book quality.

Using real world textures for color was inspired by paper cutting illustrations in picture books like The Snowy Day, or Eric Carle’s tissue paper collages. Scanning textures and using them to color in my characters helps to make digital drawings feel more natural, I think. I offset the color slightly to give her a vintage printed look. Do you think she is ready for shenanigans?

Illustrator Gina Perry is kind enough to organize this event exclusively on Bluesky and Cara.

Find out more at Gina Perry’s website.

Here are a few of my postcards:

Brian’s Postcards on Bluesky

Noodle (she has a real name, but her dad thinks this nickname suits her best) is a crafty, defiant young lady that appears in several of my stories, including INCREDIBLY BORING STORIES, FOR SHENANIGANS ONLY (where she takes center stage), HEY! THEY HAVE ZIPPERS, THE TICKLE FROM OUTER SPACE and others stories still to come. She identifies with draculas (all vampires are called draculas as far as she is concerned) and plans on world domination someday. She is opposed to early bedtimes, and enlists her twin brother Goofball in all sorts of shenanigans.