Meet Hilary A. Rinaldi
Creator of A Dinky World
Hilary’s Note to You:
Hi – I’m so glad you stopped by!
You probably don’t know this, but I don’t really like to talk about myself; I’d rather talk through my artwork and characters. Because they are, after all, extensions of myself.
But since the bear’s button pin in the picture says, “Don’t Panic” – then I can relax and have some fun sharing a few stories.
In fact, my first story is that the bear in the picture once belonged to my Grandmother, and I cannot for the life of me remember his name. This, as you can imagine, has me a bit put out because my Grandmother always chose such cute, creative names!
Oh well, I’m sure I’ll remember someday!
Anyway, here is a bit more about my background.
The Basics
Since as long as I can remember I loved to draw and especially – to color.
In fact the summer our family went to Yellowstone Park, I was about 6 or 7, and to be honest, I don’t really remember the trip very well because I was in the very way back of the station wagon flat on my stomach (which wouldn’t be allowed anymore) totally absorbed in my coloring books! I don’t think I looked up more than a few times.
I draw, paint, and color because taking an idea from my head and actualizing it onto paper is the most awesome and fulfilling thing I know to do.
And while I never went to art school, which at first I regretted, I moved forward on my own and taught myself as much as one would learn in school (and I am still learning and experimenting all the time).
With this path I was able to do what I wanted without having to conform to an art teacher’s vision and art styles, which has stifled many a budding artist.
So now I’m happy I never went to art school and just did my own thing and never looked back or doubted myself again.
The bottom line is that I can’t think of doing anything else that gives me so much pleasure and true happiness.
For years I bounced around (first earning a BS in Horticulture) then on to running my own graphic design business to doing more science-oriented work – but through all that was my total absorption in drawing comic strips.
In fact “A Dinky World” started out as a comic strip and it had more characters (whom I will work in again over time). The newspapers, however, though they loved my adorable characters and gags, felt that the current market would not like my strip – Why?
Because it was too kind and the characters too cute. Ha!
Not wanting to give up ( I’m very much like a honey badger in that regard), I turned my adorable characters into:
… and any other fun stuff I can think of.
Basically, if it entails drawing and working with my main A Dinky World Friends:
- Filbert
- Hazil
- Basil
- Leo
- Mr. Biscuits
Well then….. I’m All In!
My one and only desire is to bring joy and a smile to anyone’s face who sees my artwork because that just makes my day.
My Process
In case you want to know, I start with just a pad of paper and work in pencil until I get the feel of what I want to convey.
In the old days I would then ink and watercolor my artwork.
In the last decade however, I taught myself to paint digitally, so now I move my pencil on paper sketches to the computer and finish inking and coloring in Photoshop.
Sometimes I need to use Illustrator, or more often Inkscape, to set text that is cleaner, but 99% of my work is started by hand and finished in Photoshop.
And yes, I still do the occasional watercolor by hand simply because that is how I learned, and I still love the feel of the paper and how the brush and watercolor flow across a page.
That’s it – Pretty simple!
