I'm on They Draw and Cook this month!

The recipe/art site They Draw and Cook has six "Giggling Good Recipes" as the highlight this month, and my art was one of the six pieces included! You can see their site here (which I recommend – a lot of good art there). Or, when they have a different feature some other time, you can see the art here.

My Next Big Project: Kid Alphabet Book #3

But first, an introduction. Here is the cover and a sample page from the first one I did for my daughter:

I made this for her because when she was learning her letters, she knew capital letters really well but not small letters. When asked what the letters in "hello" were, she said "h - e - eleven - o." Which is really cool in its own way, but I doubt her school would think so.

So I made this book to be very plain, one big letter and one specific image on each page. I know a lot of alphabet books have a million things that start with each letter, but I wanted to be able to say "Remember that letter? It's on the page with the kangaroo" so that each one would be easier to remember. Either this book helped a lot (my version) or all the time my wife spent with her on her letters did (more likely reality), but I enjoyed doing it.

So then I did one for my second child. A bit late, according to my wife, since he already knew the letters by the time I finished, but I wanted him to have his own as well. Here are the cover and a sample page:

Now I'm on the third one. She doesn't know many letters yet (she's only 1) so I have a chance to get this done in time. On the other hand, I want to do this one like the bear I just finished instead of computer illustration, so perhaps it will get done in time for her own kids to learn from it. But I can dream, can't I?

You'll be seeing some rough sketches for this soon.

The best part about doing alphabet books for your kids is that you automatically end up doing 26 drawings at the least. So if you're an artist and you want an excuse to spend a lot of time drawing, offer to make someone an alphabet book.

Mother's Day Revisited

Here's the Mother's Day card I drew for my wife. Why I would draw this probably needs a little explanation.

The kids all love to play Jack and the Beanstalk. The stairs are the beanstalk and the rooms upstairs are the giant's castle. The giant – that is, me – has to pretend to sleep while guarding a golden chicken, which Jack comes to steal (in actuality, it's a chicken that lays golden eggs. However, we don't have anything that lays golden eggs, or even a chicken, as the part of the chicken is played by a rubber duck. But you work with what you have).

The only problem is that everyone wants to be the giant. You go upstairs, pretend to sleep, and when someone steals the golden chicken you jump up and chase them all over the place. So all three kids want to be the little giants that help the big giant catch that nasty thieving Jack.

So – you guessed it – the part of Jack is inevitably played by my wife (I guess the feminine form would be Jackie and the Beanstalk).

On a side note, the whole game started when my daughter did play Jack, and cut down the stairs, er, beanstalk. Then my son said "tape tape tape," meaning he taped the beanstalk back together so I could keep chasing her. I called him the little giant for helping me and the whole thing just escalated from there.