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. On a website, however, I have to – but as the pin on the bear in the picture says, “Don’t Panic” about it.

So here are some of the basics about me and my background so you can get to know me a bit better.

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 cute greeting cards, wall decor & posters, colorful gift mugs, and any other fun stuff I can think of.

Basically, if it entails drawing and working with my A Dinky World friends: Filbert, Hazil, Basil, Leo or Mr. Biscuits – I’m 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!