Caricatures, Silhouettes and Illustrations by Leona Hosack

Salt River consists of: (left to right) Cathy King on bass, Mike Rogers on blues harmonica, guitar and vocals, Bev Rogers on vocals, Leona Hosack on guitar and vocals. I'm so glad that I am still performing original and traditional folk-blues music with Salt River. This is our 17th year together! We will be performing this coming Saturday, April 9th, 2016 at Alfredo's Restaurant in Wells, Maine.(corner of Rtes.109 and 1 ) We start around 6 pm. No cover charge , great food and great music. Hope you can make it!

A caricature I did a few years ago! This is me last summer working on a portrait outside at Alfred Festival Day in Alfred, ME. St. Patrick's Day is next week and the first day of Spring is just around the corner! I would have been playing irish music today on my guitar with my wonderful friend Mary, who plays awesome flute and penny whistle, at a local cafe. But instead I am spending the weekend with my sweet, brave and patient husband as he recovers from surgery in the hospital near us here in lower seacoast Maine. Yesterday during the long hours of the surgery I could have taken a walk outside, but I got lazy in the waiting room, warm and cosy, free coffee always available! I actually got a little done on my fantasy novel for middle readers, or young adults. I haven't decided which yet! It's a good way not to focus too much on the distressing situation at hand. I read somewhere, probably in one of the many writer's blogs I tool around at, that the...

So excited to announce that my book "Babysitter Blues" published by One Voice Press is now available at Barnes and Noble.com. Click here to  order  it!: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/babysitter-blues-leona-hosack/1120693411?ean=9780989115261 Here's a caricature I did recently for a recipient of a gift certificate given out when I did caricatures at the  Franklin County Fair in Greenfield, Mass two years ago! It is soon to be posted as a sample in my Etsy shop.   "Let's Be Friends" an illustration I worked on recently just for practice. A new piece for my portfolio! Happy Drawing!

I've been going through my files of old work, drawings and sketches, and have found some of my illustrations that I haven't looked at in a while. Quite a number of years ago, I happened to have been asked to illustrate a few stories for New Millenium Press a small Baha'i Publisher out of Macau. I did the illustrations and sent them, and at the time the person I was in contact with through email, somehow disappeared and I lost contact with them. So I never found out if they actually got published.  This is a portrait of George Washington Carver and sketches and a sketch of him in the field with farmers for a story about him.  A portrait of George Washington Carver in ink and watercolor! A preliminary sketch for the pictur above.  The next four pictures below are about how children should be kind to animals, a story or section of a book based on a quote by Abdu'l-Baha.  These last two pictures were for a story about Baha'u'llah, although ...

I am excited that my illustrations have been accepted on a wonderful website called Storybird. www.https://storybird.com/  I have been in the process of trying to find an online free converter that will tranform my jpg files into tiff. files, and hopefully will also convert my regular rgb (red, green, blue) files to a cmyk(cyan, magenta, yellow and black) file, because these format are what the website requires. Since I don't have a photoshop program and I'm not quite up to speed on the Gymp program on my laptop, finding the right resource on line has been a challenge.  Today I found one that works - for me anyway! Yahoo! I still have to resize the pictures I've chosen, but that I can do on an iphoto program I have on my pc. But I found a website on line that converts not only from rgb to cmyk, but converts from jpg to tiff at the same time. I highly recommend it.  http://www.rgb2cmyk.org/ The two pictures below are two different versions of my artwork entitled...

 Here is my latest work: Below is a caricature I did for a local realter who sometimes uses caricatures for promotional materials.  Notice the houses on the birthday cake and the house shaped package on the top of the present pile!   I have been accepted as an illustrator to post my work on www.storybird.com  so I have been engaged in the process of converting some of my art files from jpg's to Tiff files, as well as changing them to the appropriate color format. This is an image that just came to me about a year ago, and I had the sketch above for all of that time, and was not sure whether it was worth finishing or not. I didn't have a story in mind or any thought of why it's a bird girl or why she looks sad or confused. I took it out of my files because I think it would fit well into the Storybird website. The idea of the website is that writers can choose an image and write about it! SO here it is (below) in process. I'm still thinking abou...

These are pics of the last two gigs I did in 2015! Plus a great video on how to cut silhouettes and a very informational video on caricaturing tools! Now I'm ready to use my off season to drum up some new gigs for the 2016 Spring, Summer, Fall and Holiday Season! I'm very excited about a Wedding Vendor Mixer I'm going to in a week in Portsmouth, Maine, sponsored by www.gayweddingsinmaine.com! Hope to line up some wedding gigs for my silhouetting OR caricaturing or even both! A Silhouette I cut  in about five minutes at Sarah Orne Jewett House in the middle of south Berwick, ME during their Home For The Holidays Christmas Celebration in early December 2015. My table set up with my silhouette display at historic Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, ME. Sarah Orne Jewett House South Berwick, ME For more info. on the history of Jewett House click here: http://www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/sarah-orne-jewett-house Here'...