Was scheduled for Jury Duty this week, so I dutifully cleared the week on my calendar. I called in the Jury schedule hotline every night, and was told every evening that I didn’t need to report the next day. So I had a bit of down time this week. I began working on an idea for a future coloring book project. As I said in the previous post, the idea being a set of scenes from my favorite books. I think my favorite sort of work, as an illustrator, is in depicting fictional scenes, whether it be short stories for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or River Styx, or novels or longer works of fiction. Hoping to do a few more samples along these lines (doing some science fiction, romance, crime fiction, classic literature, adventure) before presenting the idea to a publisher.

Got my complimentary copies of my “Western Screen Legends” coloring book last week, and it got me thinking of a new spinoff idea for the next collection. My son had just finished reading a book that I had given him for Christmas, one of my favorites, “True Grit” by Charles Portis. I thought it might be interesting, as a spinoff from the last book, to do a book of ‘favorite scenes from my favorite books’ (not sure what the title should be, quite yet), but I started off with a sketch today from the aforementioned book. (perhaps I’ll select a bit of relevant text from the book to reprint at the bottom) Other books that could be included; Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, White Fang, Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Jungle Book, Crime and Punishment, The Metamorphosis, etc etc — In the meantime, I think I’ll get going on some samples and present them to some publishers, like the last book.