Elena Wuest (German, b.1977)
"An Afternoon Tea II," 2026
Oil on canvas
110 x 110 cm

#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

A small fuzzy bee with long antennae and smooth yellow face. Tucked between yellow flower petals ©️DTL 2026

The incredibly named miserable mining bee, huddled within forsythia blooms #invertebrates

I've been grisped

OKAY BUT THEY'RE $850 EACH?????? be so serious Paula. what's a normal way to email her back without sounding confused and / or desperate

this brought to you by an email from Paula Nolastname asking to buy THREE??? PAINTINGS???????? PAULA?? ARE YOU SURE

will my first reaction to someone wanting to buy a painting of mine ever stop being "are you sure" and "you saw the price, right" and "do you mean it" ???

A photo of Whose Tree Is This, a picture book with a cover depicting a child in an oak tree full of critters. The picture book has a small crocheted birthday hat perched on it and is being celebrated with a festively-besprinkled chocolate cupcake.

happy book birthday to Whose Tree Is This, which is full of bugs and bats and oaks! By wishing it a happy birthday you are also wishing a happy birthday to every oak tree, I don't make the rules!! (this was a joy to illustrate and Marilyn Singer is an amazing writer and I can't believe it's real)

Front cover of the picture book Whose Tree Is This? Poems About the Mighty Oak and Its Companions by Marilyn Singer, illustrated by Julian Plum. It features a large, gray-brown tree trunk and oak tree leaves in various shades of green with multiple animals--including chickadees, squirrels, bats, cicadas, a spider, and a butterfly--and a child with light-medium brown skin, short dark hair, and eyeglasses who is securely sitting in the tree branches.

Front cover of What Good Is a Dead Tree? A Science Mystery by Doug Wechsler. It features a large photo of a forest and in the foreground is a fallen tree trunk that is suspended between the trunks of two other trees. Foliage in the background is green, suggesting late spring or early summer.

Happy, happy book birthday to two fab tree books for inquisitive readers! WHOSE TREE IS THIS? by Marilyn Singer and @julianplum.com is a delightful picture book and WHAT GOOD IS A DEAD TREE? by @dougwechsler.bsky.social is a photo-packed MG NF book.

my kingdom for a t4t bit-swapping system, a constant joke in my deeply transgender friend circle that we all secretly wish could be real!!!

THANK YOU <3 <3 <3 I will do my best not to get arm cramps signing, apparently there's quite a bit of personalization (which I love. I am so touched)

thank you!!! I am so excited to be able to properly share some of the amazing bits of this book!!

ahhhhh Whose Tree Is This (my debut pb!!!!) comes out tomorrow and I get to go sign copies at my local indie today and suddenly it feels so real!! THIS IS SO NEAT

Could I have made a fancy graphic? yes. or told you that it has a Kirkus star and a very nice SLJ review because Marilyn Singer is an amazing writer? Also yes, but listen, if I had tried to format all of that I wouldn't have even posted this. Trying to live that "done is better than perfect" life!

Photo of the illustrator excitedly holding a real, extant copy of his debut illustrated picture book, Whose Tree Is This, in front of his face.

Hello did you know that you can preorder the first book I ever illustrated? Probably not because I haven't told you at all!

Whose Tree Is This comes out on April 7th! It's real & you can have it in your home! Get it from your local indie or B&N with their preorder sale!

@lernerbooks.bsky.social

Last day for the @barnesandnoble.com preorder sale! Preorder either one of my upcoming books and get 25% off with PREORDER25!

Because it's so much time & energy, I also have a personal floor: I need to make at least $700 in a single day for it to be worth it. It sounds like a lot, but probably 40% of the money I make goes to booth fee, travel costs, inventory, insurance, etc, and that's before regular business expenses.

Ooh! I love to dive into my own numbers. I keep pretty detailed records so I can tell which markets are worth it or not, and I only do a market again if I make at least 10x my booth fee (so if I paid $30 to be there, I need to make 300 at least.)

Top of mind because we just did our taxes but the sporadic quality of advances also makes taxes & paying for marketplace insurance so weird. "What's your income for 2026 going to be like" "well you see, I have no idea! here is my best guess. it will probably be wrong. hope that helps!"

By which I mean, you're not like "pitching" people on your work, but for example when folks come up to my booth, I usually am like "so this is all painted in gouache on paper!" and then either talk about the fact that I'm a picture book illustrator or share something about the piece they have.

Oh I LOVE my in-person markets! Just had my first one of the year yesterday :) I made a whole presentation for my critique group about why everyone in illustration should at least consider doing them. Just remember that basically everyone at a market wants art that comes with a story!

I would LOVE to have online sales make up more of my income but I just am not like... social media savvy enough to make it work, I think. Much more successful talking to folks in person about the plants and critters I am painting!

Last year (2025) I made a full-time income, just enough to support myself & my spouse while they go to school. They got a lil bit of unemployment income through a "you're training to do a thing" program from the state, and we relied on our savings a tiny bit. Idk that I could do it again!

For context: I'm a picture book illustrator and I would LOVE for that to make up more of my income, but it's just not feasible right now! I'm also experimenting with teaching classes & Patreon, but I'm already close to burning out so I gotta be careful.

I do about 18 in-person art markets a year selling original paintings and prints of my work, and that makes up about 3/4 of my income. It's steadier than the unsteady drip of publishing. Tiring, but I haven't had success with online art sales at scale, and I like talking to folks!

A blue graphic with an outline of the United States. Red and white text reads: Call. National Book Banning Bill Proposed in US House of Reps. Tell your rep: Vote no on H.R. 7661.

A blue and red graphic with white text that reads: House Republicans have introduced a bill to effectively grant the federal government decision-making power over what books make it into the library. H.R. 7661 is a national-level book banning bill that would ban any book that, according to the bill's language, "(ii) involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism." This means any book about a trans person or the trans experience would be banned from every public school in the United States.

A blue graphic with red and white text that reads: Call your reps. Tell them they must oppose this bill at every turn. It is egregiously unconstitutional, targets ideas based on ideological disapproval, and misleads parents and the public about the content of children's books. It does nothing to protect kids and will badly harm education. It will tie school material funding into knots and hurt anyone who is a library materials vendor, regardless of content. If you are a bookseller, librarian, or author, tell them your livelihood depends on the next generation of readers.

I've got a longer piece cooking on the book banning bill HR 7661 that isn't about my books. But I wanted to pop on here to show the impact this will have on one small-time indie author who writes a lot of different kinds of books.

Here's the 5calls script for HR 7661. 5calls.org/issue/federa...

A Wish with Wings by Sarah Guillory A 12-year-old rails against others’ expectations and revels in her budding autonomy in this evocative novel from Guillory (Gus a...

★ Sarah Guillory’s “evocative” middle grade novel A WISH WITH WINGS “celebrates the natural world and one’s place in it”

Totally agree about the consistency! Every episode has been consistently good and interesting. I also don't remember the last time I SO quickly cared about each and every member of a ST ensemble cast. Like I always like them but the SFA cast all charmed me immediately!!

it was so fun!!! the gameplay is like, deeply simple bc I was mostly interested in illustrating the critters, but I made the board itself, box and inserts, and modeled and 3D printed gamepieces and a little cup to keep them in. It was a blast. I think I illustrated 80+ creatures for it.

SAME I want it so bad!! prehistory and specifically ancient paleohistory from life to now is my original passion. for my capstone art degree project I designed & illustrated a boardgame playing through the history of life on earth and it was SO MUCH FUN.

also I recognize that in order to make this happen on my end I need to actually. make. paleoart. which means finishing this book dummy first. no rest for me (positive)