Cats Make Honey (2)

Here are two more from Cats Make Honey. The first one is the two kids talking about bumblecats, and the second is a bee that flew in to set the record straight (unsuccessfully):

Cats Make Honey (1)

I mentioned that I do books for my kids. The first one I ever did was "Cats Make Honey."

One day at breakfast, when my daughter was about 3 years old, she told me that cats make honey. I liked the idea of that so much that I made up a story to go with it and spent months on the illustrations. Naturally, by the time I gave it to her (Christmas) she had completely forgotten she had said it and told me that cats don't make honey.

But it did get me into the habit of making books for the kids each year at Christmas. This year was number 4. The drawing I want to make into a painting is from the second one. If I keep this up, and try and make books that still interest them, in about 10 years I'll be writing teen angst novels.

Here's the picture of all the bumblecats in their hive making honey:

My first blog

A blog was inevitable, once I broke down and accepted my first i-pod. From here it's just a long slippery slope to acquiring the Kindle.

My wife is my over-the-shoulder editor. Dangerously, I'm choosing to ignore her comments so I can actually have my own blog. So she's just threatened to write her blog about my blog. I'll just have to put something weird on here eventually so she'll have something to write about.

In the meantime, here's some art (the real reason I've started this):

This started out as a request from a history professor about Celtic mythology. He asked if I'd ever drawn a ram-headed serpent, and I hadn't. So I sketched one out. Then I thought it needed some colored pencil. Then I got too carried away and had to white out the background with acrylic paint, which resulted in the background being far richer and more interesting than the actual drawing itself. Consequently, my quick pencil sketch turned into a full painting almost without me paying attention.

And, on the other end of the spectrum from monster snakes:

This is a drawing I did for our wedding anniversary. When people saw me drawing this, they said it was so romantic. When the big day came and I showed my wife, she said I needed to work on the mid-tones. That's what happens when artists marry artists.

And finally, a work in progress:

This is from a book I did for my kids' Christmas present. I've always wanted to do the whole story in full color for them (well, in a perfect world I'd also be doing the whole thing in color for some publishers, en route to being made into a film franchise, making me enough money to single-handedly save the economy). I've started this one – as it progresses I'll display it either with pride or in despair, depending how it comes along.