John Deininger

www.johndeininger.blogspot.com - Gallery

For the curious: it's pronounced "dine-ing-grrr", and yep, I LOVE to illustrate children's picture books!

Two years ago with a go-for-it by everyone, I jumped full-time into a lifelong dream of creating meaningful visual stories for children. In the rear view are career hats as buyer, retail store developer, and planner of inventories and distribution (strangely, I miss building spreadsheets).

The Mentorship has been an overwhelming, joyous recognition of my commitment; a momentary peek from the drawing table to be surprised by six incredible Mentors saying, you're going the right way! The portfolio was almost entirely new work completed in the three months leading up to the 2010 LA Conference, and brightly reflected six years of listening and learning at national and local SCBWI conferences, meetings, and workshops.

The months ahead are jam-packed with go-go-go! I'm excited to take the steps encouraged by the Mentorship committee: complete and submit my robot story dummy, create promo mailers with impact, add back-to-back page-turns to the portfolio, market internationally, and a-whole-lotta more.

For more info, step-by-steps, inspirations, etc., please visit my blogfolio: johndeininger.blogspot.com

I use lots of different stuff to create images. Pencils, paints, crayons, photos, robots (computers) - whatever makes an image look fun and cool and curious.

My life story is pretty boring. All I did growing up was look at stuff and draw stuff - just staring at the ceiling. And now I'm an adult who stares at ceilings. Man, it's tough to talk to most people because they don't like to talk about ceilings, right? Though sometimes my wife will listen to me talk about ceilings, which is nice. Thank you, Jana. And sometimes my cats will stare with me. That's nice, too.

I live in Seattle with my best friend Jana, three cats, and the rain. You also might spot me exporing the Pacific Northwest's mountains and meadows.

I'm currently developing characters, art, and words for several picture books, with the incredible help of my agent, Rubin Pfeffer, of East West Literary Agency. I'm also very open to any other children's book or licensing opportunities. Feel free to give either me or Rubin a shout!

And thank you for checkin' out the Mentees' blog,

-John Deininger

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jedeininger@msn.com

c: 206.930.8507

424 Summit Ave E #403
Seattle Wa 98102