The Creative Castle was one of the most imaginative illustrations I made for the book Crossing The Troll Bridge. The castle is a metaphor for “you the creative artist with a unique creative spirit”.

I almost like the photo of the unfinished illustration better, because it shows the castle (and me as an artist) in that magical state of emerging and becoming (which I think is possibly the funnest most exciting experience of being an imaginative creative artist).

For the last 24 years I have been teaching an illustration class at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California. The 2016 spring semester has just ended and this enthusiastic class was filled with 22 talented creative student artists! Here are a few of the illustrations they created. I included each artist’s name on their illustration.

This is the cover for a new coloring book I made in April 2016.   I wrote at the beginning of the coloring book: “Drawfan is a pseudonym, alter ego, doppelgänger for the real person Frank Robert Dixon (who drew all the pictures in this coloring book)”.

Yesterday I sent in my one submission to Spectrum 23: The Best In Contemporary Fantastic Art. This is a challenging book to get in– I have sent in art almost every year for the past 20 years…. and only one image has ever made it into the book (back in 1999). This year I have submitted this “round robot” painting. I created it using charcoal, watercolor, acrylic paint, oil paint and at the end some adjustments using Photoshop. I will find out in April, 2016 if it gets into the book or not….

(Update: it did not make it into Spectrum… I will get to try again next year!)

I am working on creating my new website: DrawFantasyCreatures.com. I hope to have it finished in Summer, 2016.   Here is the image I am thinking of using on the home page.

Robin Blakely and Frank Robert Dixon ( me! ) are going to do a slide presentation about our new book– Crossing The Troll Bridge– at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, November 13 from 7 to 8:30 pm.

I drove down to LA and saw this amazing bookstore a couple months ago.  Very fun place!  Lots of books and creative art too!  Just seeing the unique bookstore is worth the drive!  I hope to see you that evening!
Here are some photos of this entertaining bookstore….

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This is an image I made to promote a new book I co-wrote and illustrated, Crossing The Troll Bridge, which goes on sale on Amazon.com in 2 days on Saturday October 3. The book is a marketing guide for artists and writers. I created over 60 color illustrations for this book.  (Yes, the guy the troll is grabbing is a cartoon version of me!)

This is a short interview I did with fantasy artist Crystal Sully at Spectrum Fantastic Art Live in May, 2015 in Kansas City, Missouri.

At Spectrum Fantastic Art 2015 I took videos of some of the fantasy artists who were there. This is a video of how Audrey Benjaminson created her image of a “cat queen”.

May 22-24, 2015 I was at Spectrum Fantastic Art Live taking short videos of some of the amazing fantasy creature artists who were there. Here is an interview I did with artist Afton Kern.

(Note: I do not yet have the website DrawFantasyCreatures.com done yet. I plan to have that website up later this summer. At the moment you are redirected to FrankRobertDixon.com)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-vkYTbMyoU