In Conversation with Joann Hill at Fanfaire NYC 2025

On Sunday, April 6th, I’ll be appearing at Fanfaire to benefit the New York City’s renown High School of Art & Design. I’ll be in conversation with my wonderful Art Director, Joann Hill, discussing my journey as an illustrator as well as our collaboration bringing Party Animals to life. Fanfaire is an incredible event for anyone interested in the visual arts. Here’s how the school describes it:

“FanfaireNYC is our annual multi-day festival created by the Art & Design High School Parent Teacher Association. It is a celebration of creativity, entrepreneurship, and technology in the arts from cartooning and animation through graphic design, architecture, and fashion. 

The event features over 100+ artists and vendors selling comics, prints and merch. Award-winning guest speakers provide insights about their careers and creative process. Additionally, fans and aspiring artists attend costume contests, panel discussions, workshops and portfolio reviews.”

For tickets and more information, please visit the Fanfaire NYC website here. I hope to see you there!

Fanfaire NYC logo 2025
Anna Raff and Joann Hill promo photos for Fanfaire NYC 2025 event.
Share

Storytime with Tara Lazar and me…at Watchung in New Jersey!

Hey…that rhymes! This Sunday, March 16th at 2 PM, Party Animals creators, Tara Lazar and I will be at one of my favorite, Northeast, independent bookstores—Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey.

We’ll be celebrating the publication of our new book from Disney-Hyperion, which released earlier this week. As Tara would say, it’s going to be “a humdinger, hullabaloo, rip-roaring good time!” In addition to a reading, we’ll have a craft activity, some drawing, and other treats!

Keen-eyed readers will notice a few special details from the story that we’ll be sharing. Sample a “Horace d’Oeuvre!” Take home an actual Horace walking stick facsimile…No joke! And if you purchase a copy of Party Animals, you’ll get a free stickersheet featuring all of four characters.

So grab you favorite party animals, and come join us! Watchung Booksellers is located at 54 Fairfield Street, Watchung Plaza, in Montclair, New Jersey. For more information, visit their website here.

A Holiday Greeting...Behind-the-Scenes

I love making holiday cards—I always have. Yet every December, around mid-month, I realize it’s almost Christmas and I haven’t a glimmer of an idea of what to do. 

This year, the routine was no different. A few weeks ago, I started looking around my studio at the miscellaneous scraps of cardboard, stickers, styrofoam, and brown paper coffee sleeves I’d collected for inspiration. (Full disclosure: I have a hard time throwing away any piece of sturdy, clean cardboard.) Maybe the materials would guide me to something? 

I started building a mini set peppered with coffee sleeve trees, a construction paper sky, torn up paper towel mountains, and a styrofoam (for snow) stage. Then I thought of a bag of googly eyes I keep deep in a box of materials for book events, and played around with them some. I replaced all the tree lights with googly eyes, and made a quick draft of an animation. It was fun and weird….but not quite right. And I was bummed out. 

The next morning, I texted the clip to my best friend, Lee for an opinion. He liked it, and encouraged me to carry on. Then a few moments after our initial exchange, he wrote again. “The trees kind of remind me of sharks.” And that was it—the spark I’d needed. The added, unspoken, tinge of subversive humor I could quite grasp on my own. And I was off and running. 

At the studio that day, I scrapped my earlier footage and started over. I fine tuned my cast of characters with a special, new guest star—a shark. I built him a Santa hat using a recent acquisition from my mom: her collection of felt scraps. (My mom used to make me felt finger puppets, and full disclosure: she has a hard time throwing away potential craft supplies too.)

Lately, I’ve started dabbling with creating my own sound effects in lieu of using free sounds from online. The Voice Memos app on the iPhone works really well, and is forgivingly simple for an amateur like me. It’s so kooky figuring these things out! That bag of googly eyes I mentioned almost beat out a literal garland of bells for the shark’s sleigh bells sound. And the swimming shark cutting through the icy snow? That’s just a folded up coffee sleeve scrapping against cardboard. Mostly, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I love emersing myself in a let’s-give-it-a-try-and-see-if-it-works-out attitude. 

I drew myself a quick storyboard sequence to keep track of the ideas and effects I wanted to include. Last, I played around with lighting…Well, in reality, I played around a cheapo clamp lamp that would stand in for the setting sun. 

I’m mostly self-taught when it comes to After Effects, the program I use to build my animations. And I’d be nowhere without help from the occasional YouTube video. What’s so rewarding as I get better at AE, is knowing what I want to do, the effect I think I should use, asking the internet if it exists, and so on. And everytime I use AE, I learn something new. It’s rewarding when it works out and feels like magic! I learned a bunch of things this time.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed a glimpse behind-the-scenes. here it is, the final animation. With a special acknowledgement to my pal, Lee for that extra spark!✨