A Shelter in Place Easter

Everything we tried to order for Easter baskets were sold out! While the Easter Bunny has been called an "essential worker" (by Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's Prime Minister!), it occurred to me that we might not be the only home where he wouldn't be able to deliver. So I wrote this book to give a little Easter cheer to the kids.

I wanted to put it out there for free, since I hope and pray that a "shelter in place Easter" is a once-in-a-lifetime event. If all goes well this storywill be completely irrelevant by next year!

Here is the link to the whole book: A Shelter in Place Easter: book

The Silver Rings - It's Here!

The Silver Rings is now available at http://www.brattlepublishingstore.com/trade-publishing/the-silver-rings!

Here's the book description:

Alice and Celia are identical — as twins, and as the recipients of ghastly treatment from their horrid stepmother and stepsisters. To escape, they flee to their fairy godmother Mozzarella’s house. There, Mozzarella advises them to separate and make their way in the world, offering them the rather dubious assurances of troll skin disguises and silver, somewhat magical, rings.

Alice manages to find an abandoned cave of treasure, and settles in to blissful solitude. Celia, on the other hand, runs afoul of a bad-tempered witch, and is promptly turned into a frog. Informed by her magic ring of Celia’s peril, but not her whereabouts, Alice sets out to rescue her. Instead, she finds herself atop a glass mountain, avoiding the love-struck Prince Randall. With Alice’s quest at a standstill, and Celia still enchanted, will the sisters ever realize the high hopes that their godmother envisioned?

Got to create a lot of artwork for the book as well, so more pics to come!

Meadhall

A reconstruction drawing for the book The Making of Middle Earth, about the sources Tolkien used to create The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

This is a cutaway section of a meadhall, where feasting and drinking would take place, all with a big fire pit raging in the center of the floor. With wooden walls. And a thatched roof. You know, when I put it that way, that may be the reason why people need to draw what they used to look like, instead of taking a picture of any existing ones.

Sleeping Beauty's Mother-In-Law

Another one from the Modern Grimmoire book - it even shows up on one of the "Look Inside" pages on Amazon!

The illustration comes from an older version of Sleeping Beauty, by Charles Perrault. In most current versions, it's all happily-ever-after once the Prince kisses her. In Perrault, once she wakes up her troubles are only beginning. The Prince's stepmother is an ogre, who wants to eat her own step-grandchildren, along with Sleeping Beauty as well! And, were it not for the kindness of the cook, she would have succeeded. Then the ogre tries to kill them all with snakes and poison toads… but why give away the ending?

Hans My Hedgehog

An illustration that got into Indigo Press' "Modern Grimmoire." They're an independent publisher, but the book is available on Amazon.

I always like "Hans My Hedgehog" ever since I read it in Grimm's Fairy Tales, mainly because it's so surreal. He's a half-human, half-hedgehog who's parents want him to leave. He agrees, but only if they shoe his rooster and give him bagpipes. Only after I started drawing it did I realize what an unfortunate instrument a bagpipe is for an animal with sharp spines!

The Jungle Explorers - the book

I finished this book a while ago, and always wanted to put the whole thing up. And now I can! The blog won't let me post a multiple-page PDF, but another site, called Dribbble, will. Here is the book in its entirety! Just click on the attachment below the picture.

The Return of the Mermaid

The Woodcutter Story: Several Problems Resolved

This isn't a post about new art per se, although some of that comes into it. It's more about composition and consistency.

In the Frog Prince book, one of the things I liked most about doing it were the split-screen pages, like this one:

But, because of the way the story went, I didn't really have an opportunity to use something similar for the Woodcutter story. But this kind of bugged me. All the pages seemed so... flat. Granted, all pages are, but it was especially noticeable in this one because of the style of art and how little action happens on some of the pages.

In particular, this page caused the most problems:

It doesn't seem like it would, but it did. Because it's just him standing there. So I got it to where I was happy enough with it, and decided to continue on with other ones. Then, as I was moving along, I got to page 17 (which I'll show in a bit).

On that page, I had to show the bad woodcutter throwing his axe in the water, while at the same time he was pretending to cry. In any other style, I could make this work in a square format. But since the (self-imposed) restraints on the style of this book means I can't use shading, perspective, etc., I was stuck with a composition that was hopelessly horizontal.

The problem was solved, of course, if I could break it up like the Frog Prince story. But I hadn't done anything like that so far, so it would look weird in the context of the book, even if I liked it by itself.

Then I remembered the problem page. If I broke that up, along with its companion page, I'd get this in earlier, and fix the page that was bugging me. Here are the two new versions:

And here's the new one that forced me to overcome the composition problem:

They all look similar here, but in the book they'll be separated by a number of pages, like the split-screen ones in the Frog Prince. The only thing I miss in the silver axe page is that I showed the tree he was standing under in the original version. I liked it, but it couldn't carry the whole page, so out it went.

Happiness for Some, Greed for Others

Back to the woodcutter story. Nearing the end!

The Story Continues

Oh, those sneaky mermaids. Good thing our hero is so honest.

Complaint is Voiced and a Test Devised

The Gingerbread Policeman (II)

The saga begins.

When I initially envisioned the story, it was going to start with the third image. I figured that everyone would know the story, so I wouldn't need to put the first part. But when I showed the story to my writing group, they all thought that small kids might not know the story as well as I was assuming, so it was better to tell it briefly.

The good part about that was that it gave me an excuse to do a painting of the Gingerbread Man bursting out of the oven. And the animals chasing him were fun too.

Interlude – The Gingerbread Policeman (I)

Here's another thing while I'm painting. It's a book that I did for my kids, so I'll put up images from it every so often during the down times on the alphabet book.

It was a bit of an experiment. Every Christmas I try to make a book for the kids, and this last year I wrote one that included all of them, doing all the things they like to do. It was received with what can best be described as apathy. It was pointed out to me that A) it was Christmas and there's far too many toys to care about books and B) it was in black and white.

So, as an experiment, I decided to try one in color, and see how quickly I could do it. The result is this book, which I gave to them the day before Easter. That way I A) avoided competing with candy on the actual day and B) gave them something in color. It was much better received. So next Christmas it's going to be all color again. And hopefully finished before Christmas day.