I’ve shared the above illustration before. It was from the first of my ‘scratchboard coloring books’ that I did for Dover last year, and the project has spawned a sequel which should be hitting the stores very soon, of a collection of ‘all animals’ illustrations in a similar scratchboard style. Meanwhile, I had proposed a third book to the publisher a couple weeks ago, doing an entire collection of ‘trees’ along similar lines. The illustration above was one of my favorites from the first collection, and I was itching to do some more. The project was given a go ahead and I’ve begun work on the next collection. This also coincides with a side project that I’d been contemplating for the past two years. I’ve been taking a lot of walks in a nearby park, and noticing how many interesting trees I pass on a daily basis, and I’ve thought many times of bringing a sketchbook down and seeing how many of the trees in the park I can draw, and perhaps fill up a sketchbook for the first time in my life (I’m not one of those artists that carry a sketchbook around with them all the time, constantly drawing, and it takes a concerted effort on my part to even fill one of the many sketchbooks I’ve got laying around). So, anyways, I’m looking forward to working on this project, and should have some samples to share with you later in the year, when the book nears publication.

I’m also currently in the early stages of another of those “Who Was” books for Penguin, and it should keep me busy for the latter half of the year.

In the meantime, I also finished up another of those ‘cartoon strips’ for a local elder care lawyer. I’ve been doing several of these throughout the year, but I don’t always post samples, since they are fairly similar to each other. This time, however, the style and subject matter was a bit different, so I thought I’d share this latest one. I had suggested that as a change of pace, they take a break from the usual ‘Mary Worth’-style comics and try a Disney/Pogo Possum-style animal scenario. These usually run in several West Michigan newspapers (in a variety of sizes and formats depending on the paper), with the ‘teaser strip’ running on a front page, and the larger ‘conclusion strip’ running somewhere inside.