Autumn Weekends

The last couple of weekends were spent with family in Pennsylvania, and I'm so glad that we were able to get a healthy taste of *genuine* autumn—something that's easy to forget about here in concrete-covered New York. The following photos were taken at Terrain @ Styer's in Glen Mills and Highland Orchards in West Chester.

The Great American Cookbook

Today marks the release of The Great American Cookbook by Clementine Paddleford, and it was described by its publisher, Rizzoli USA, as "The first and greatest book of regional American cuisine, now revised for today’s home cook."

Hana Anouk Nakamura from Mucca Design contacted me to do some silhouette illustrations of food, people, and animals, and I was pretty much over-the-moon about it—who doesn't love drawing food? And besides, I really could draw silhouettes all day long. Not *all* of my drawings appear to have been used in the final book, but I was very pleased to receive a beautifully printed copy the other day, and am already excited to try such old-timey, Americana recipes as "Mrs. Morton's Apple Crisp Pudding" and "Souffléd Macaroni and Cheese." Get ready, arteries.

Thanks again Hana! This was a particularly fun one.

Werk.

It was at about this time last year that I started an in-house freelance job at HarperCollins, working on a specific yet large-scale project that involved dozens of reprints & repackages of Agatha Christie mysteries, which were to be marketed to a younger audience. While some of the titles would be adopting cover designs from the UK, they all needed a new, more consistently branded look, to be resized to fit Harper Paperback trim sizes, and quite a few of the books needed completely new designs/illustrations. It was a really wonderful experience—the Harper art department is full of some of the industry's most talented designers, and they're straight-up great people as well. Robin Bilardello was my brilliant art director/cheerleader throughout the whole process, and that experience alone was worth its weight in gold. Robin=the best. Here are a few of my favorite repackages:

These were all done in only a couple of weeks, as the deadline was reeeeaaaaaally tight to send them off to print. I finished these covers at the end of February, and they were printed and on bookstore shelves by mid-April. That's about one nanosecond in publishing time! Typically covers are designed about one year before they're scheduled to be published.

Speaking of working ahead of time, this is a cover that I designed/illustrated for Scholastic (whose Creative Director is the absolutely wonderful Elizabeth Parisi) at about this time last year, and it's not coming out until March 2012—nearly two years later:

That's all for now; hopefully I can put together a couple of process posts soon, since I've got mountains and mountains of comps for a few of my recent Penguin titles...

WHAT UP?!

Oh my—it's been a mortifyingly long time since I've posted. Life, you know? Changes.
Here's what's changed:

I got married.

© Amy DiLorenzo

To the wonderful Jim Tierney!

© Amy DiLorenzo

© Amy DiLorenzo

© Amy DiLorenzo

© Amy DiLorenzo

...Then we went on an English honeymoon.

Two of my sisters had babies within a month of each other.




We inherited a cat named Tawny.


And then summer ended rather quietly.

Autumn is here though, bringing with it all new changes! I'm happy to report that I'm finally able to share a lot of the work that I've done in the last few months, so that'll be yet another big, honking post. Please bear with me while I play 2011 catch-up! I'm definitely ready to get back into the swing of things...

All wedding photos © Amy DiLorenzo; all other photos by me.