From Doodles to Websites

From Doodles to Websites

First a Chat.

All January I was frazzle-busy. In between cooking and company I was writing and polishing my new book. Nigel is illustrating the cover. "Please give the mother a contented smile and make it a good-hair-day," I said. He is obliging me accordingly. I hope to tell you about the book soon. I am working to make it as ministering as I can.

I found this old photograph taken in Christmas 1990 (just before I started my Parents' Review). My red dress is a Laura Ashley, wool cotton. It is in my closet still today. That was the last year I kept my hair to my waist. I used to love holding a little one on my hip. In this picture it is Nigel hanging there. Yolanda is in green. Sophia is in red. She is now five years older than I was in this picture. Oh my. (I'm feeling nostalgic this winter. What fun those home-teaching years were.) I hope to have some happy news to tell you about Yolanda and Sophia in my next blog post. I have an old photo of Dean and Nigel to share, next time we meet.


Poor Dean has a bad cold and is in bed. It's a good thing we have homemade broth in the freezer (from the Thanksgiving turkey). My next blog post is in draft still so I decided to make this announcement in the meantime.
I am delighted to announce our new family business venture.

Starry Night Media, LLC.

My son built the website starrynightmedia.com to showcase his abilities. Isn’t it handsome? He’s an award-winning web designer, graphic designer, and illustrator.

Starry Night Media provides quality websites, beautiful graphic designs, and artistic illustration services.  

With web design he can build you a brand-new website, spruce up your old one or aid your efforts to do it yourself. He built our charlottemason.com website and makes sure his projects work on all popular devices. If you watch the hot-air balloon on our website you will see it is sailing on the breeze.

With a diverse range of art styles we can illustrate most anything you can imagine.

At present, Nigel has some book illustrations in-the-works and is happiest while painting and drawing.


He painted this spotlight of a grocery store shelf. It shows how useful a good illustration can be in making your product stand out. The exotic squirrel on "Gold Crisp" corn flakes is an example of an interesting cereal box. "Puffs" is bland in more ways than one. he, he. If you eat "Sugar Rush" you are at risk of glowing in the dark.

To fit the banner width of the website Nigel expanded Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. He matched the art style impeccably with his own composition. For example, the sparkling river in the painting is entirely his artwork and add-on.

He is often asked what drawing course he took as a boy. Just picking up a pencil and leisurely drawing what he felt like drawing, while listening to the Your Story Hour audio or a Jim Weiss audio, developed his skill. That's basically it. Time spent drawing. He doodled on his Saxon Math page to my dismay. "Can't you resist doodling on at least a few pages. I need to put some dignified-looking neat-n'-tidy doodle-free pages in your the portfolio," I pleaded. Years of Picture Study must have carried some weighty influence, too. We can never know to what measure "inspiration" plays a part in education. But we can be sure it does.

The only exercises that were of real practical help, he says, were the ones by Jon Gnagy. We followed the exercises in the age-old brown book. I see on Amazon that the brown book is sold expensively, being that it is probably out-of-print. My link is to a kit that is shown to be in color. I wonder how close it is to the old brown book.

Click here to contact us today and see what we can do for you at Starry Night Media.

You can also follow us on Facebook by clicking here.

Until next time,

Karen Andreola