cartoon

Epic Fails: Wright Brothers: Nose-Diving Into History

MacMillan

Wright4

 

In 2017 I was approached by MacMillan Children’s Publishing to illustrate a book which was to be a possible first in a series of young readers historical books. The series being called “Epic Fails” and the first book was “The Wright Brothers: Nose-Diving Into History”. These were somewhat similar to the Who Was books that I was doing for Penguin, but with definitely more of a tongue-in-cheek humor in the outlook and writing. Eventually, this series would get the green light, and I have been involved with 4 of the titles so far (more to come on these as they go into production).

I had worked for MacMillan more than twenty five years previously, mostly illustrating textbook covers for their educational division. Nice to be working with them once again.

Anyways, here’s the illustrations for that first book on the Wright Brothers and the history of flight (not to be confused with a book I did for Penguin called “Who Were The Wright Brothers”).

Wright1Wright3Wright2

Is It Safe?

Skyhorse Publishing

IsItSafe1

 

The publisher I am currently working for doing a ‘Peter Cottontail’ reprint, was one that I had worked with last year on a book called “Is It Safe to Kiss My Cat?”, and I realized that I had previously shared all the color spot illustrations for that project, but had not yet shared any of the many black and white spot cartoons. So, here they are. I really enjoy this sort of work, and the style is very reminiscent of work I used to do for an educational publisher back around 2000-2004.

IsItSafe2

 

IsItSafe3

Spot Illustrations for New Book Project

Skyhorse Publishing

ColorSpotsWebBeen fairly busy the past several weeks, so I’ve been remiss in posting samples. These are a series of color spots that I did for an upcoming book for Skyhorse Publishing called “Is It Safe to Kiss Your Cat?” I also have several black and white cartoons for the same project to post, but I’ll wait until next week sometime (UPDATE: it eventually took me a year to post them).

 

Weekender

Highlights


Very busy couple of days this past weekend. Spent most of Saturday working on the upcoming hush hush book project, but still found time to take a long bike ride to clear my head before a marathon 4 hours of playing music with the Jukejoint Handmedowns at a bar in Belmont that evening. Got to bed around 3, then woke up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to begin work on an involved ‘What’s Wrong’ picture for an upcoming back cover of Highlights. Got it done by the end of the day, and then crashed for a long night’s sleep. You can see a larger version by clicking on the above image, or you can see the revised version in which they had me change the ‘bird man’ to just a bird this morning for some reason. Back to work…

days 83-86 of the challenge

Baker Book House, Llewellyn

Day Eighty Three


Another rough sketch, this one for the upcoming ‘witch’ book cover that I’ve been doing every year for the past five years about this time.

Day Eighty Four


Working on finishes for a book cover of ‘animal jokes’ for Baker Book House. More to come tomorrow.

Day Eighty Five


More animals for the Baker Book House project. The Hippo and Monkey are for the cover, and I’ve also been asked to do several inside animals for sprinkling around the text (these will be in bw, but I’m doing them in color anyways and then converting them to greyscale). More to come.

Day Eighty Six


A few more of the animals for the Baker Book House ‘Animal Joke Book’ project.