“Pink Lemonade” a book of children’s poems, translated from the Dutch, I illustrated for Eerdman’s Publishing in late ’91. The interior of this book was all black and white line art, mostly in a crosshatch style that I eventually abandoned (and then started using again 25 years later when I started doing work for Penguin and Baker Book House), and the cover was a combination of line art and watercolor. My biggest influence for the cover was the dust jacket for the original “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” hardcover edition (with its mixture of color and black and white imagery, pictured below).

“Pink Lemonade” is out of print but still available used for reasonable rates at Amazon and sometimes you can still find them on eBay (there’s an earlier edition NOT illustrated by me, so be careful – original edition pictured above). For a young illustrator, only two years into his career, it was a big deal at the time, and I even did a book signing at a local book store.

I’ve taken photos of all the illustrations from a copy of the book I have in my library, and this is the first time I’ve shared these in nearly thirty years.

My son was about 2 when this book was completed, so I snuck a few drawings of him into the cover, and into the ‘parade’ illustration on the inside endpapers.

 

My one regret, is that at the end of the project, the art director asked me if I wanted all the artwork back, and I, in typical short-sighted fashion, shrugged it off with a ‘no’. Fifteen years later, I got a request from a fan in Holland, who wanted to buy original art, and unfortunately, I only had a single piece available that I had hung on to out of sentimental value. I contacted the publisher to see if maybe the art wasn’t still cluttering up some drawer somewhere, but it had long since been tossed. Nothing remains from this project aside from a single original illustration and a demo drawing.