There’s a new girl in town, and she’s looking good – my LitKids Little Bo Peep screenprint, that is!

After getting saddled with a heavy workload throughout the early part of this year, I was so relieved to find some time in the past month to develop a new print. This particular one has been in the works for a while. It started a few years back, when a craft fair shopper asked if I had any nursery-ready subjects for parents with babies. Before blurting out “All of these are great for that purpose, have a little imagination,” I stopped myself and agreed that it was a good idea. Indeed, some kind of print that could serve as a baby shower gift was needed to flesh out the variety of items at the store.

Casting aside the subject matter (which was a delight to draw), I’m really happy with how this print came out. I’m getting better with using the color layers in an offbeat way, and the print quality is coming out less amateurish with each new design. Little Bo Peep and her sheep is availabe, as usual, at LitKids.

Although I’ve been hella busy lately (p.s. – whatever happened to using the word “hella”), I have had a few spare moments to pull together this new, improved version of the LitKids print with Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. I originally printed Jim as part of the original few LitKids in 2010, but the lines on the drawing ended up being too thin and as a result only a few decent prints came out of it. This newer version, re-drawn with more robust lines and printed in three colors, came out much nicer. I ran out of Treasure Island pages on this one, so some of them were printed with circa 1910 copies of Swiss Family Robinson and Aladdin.

The Jim Hawkins Edition 2 LitKids Print is only $12 at my Etsy shop.

Our friend Cindy has a swell LitKids DVD giveaway in April that ends today. Simply like my Etsy shop, like LitKids on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter or Pinterest to enter. The prize is the 3-disc Craft In America DVD set which I reviewed at DVD Talk last March.

I’ve been wanting to do a Nancy Drew LitKids print for a while — the teen sleuth is a little more modern than the other characters I’ve got, but she does fit in with the iconic Kids Lit canon. Although we constantly come across the Nancy books during our thrift store jaunts, they’re always reprints from the ’60s and later. Eventually I found an original 1946 printing of The Mystery of the Tolling Bell at a used book store. Once that was in place, doing a design with silhouette Nancy and her famous flashlight was easy. I chose to replace her trench coat with a smart ’40s frock, too. This one was a long time coming (the holidays, work, work, work), but it’s finally ready for sale at LitKids.

Christopher decided to shoot a video of me demonstrating the different stages of making the Nancy print. The first part (of four) is below. Though the screen I did in this video turned out to be underexposed and not usable, the videos hopefully have a lot of info for would-be screen printers. Enjoy!

At LitKids, I came up with something to make up for the dwindling supply of Alice In Wonderland prints on hand. These new prints use the same design and book pages, but they are printed in silver and black inks. These came out really nice, even better than the original red-on-pink design. The black-on-silver ones are gorgeous, and the reverse silver-on-black gives the image a striking “goth” feel (although they didn’t come out as nice). I feel especially proud of these since they were done from a brand new silk screen — Alice is the most complex image, and to get a good screen exposure in the sunlight, it has to be timed especially right.

The silver prints cost $15 and the black ones are $12. Check them out!

My summer LitKids project has come to fruition — a spiffy box set of blank note cards! This project actually started last spring, when the proprietor MADE Boutique here in Phoenix brought up the fact that note cards always sell in her shop. From the beginning I thought I’d use the popular Anne of Green Gables, Jo from Little Women and Alice In Wonderland images on the cards, but I put off printing them until the Tom Sawyer one was finished (I knew it would come out nice, and it’s good to have a boy to add to the three girls).

Once the cards were designed, it was pretty easy getting them printed at Overnight Prints. Add in boxes, clear plastic sleeves, and labels on the back and voilà — eight LitKids cards in a box!