I’m pretty much done with my up coming book Animals Don’t So I Won’t. The art that is, now we have to do the typography and design. All of the paintings have been done in water color and pen and ink. The book will be out sometime this fall.
I’m excited to announce that I’m in the middle of a book which will come out this fall. The story and paintings are coming along nicely. Here is an image I just finished for one of the pages. More to come.
These are two studies for the same book. I’m not sure I like either yet; both have their merits and weaknesses.
This is an image for my latest children’s book I’ve been working on. No it’s not about dinosaurs. It’s about a dimetrodon (a mammal-like reptile and precursor to the dinosaurs.) I just finished the 32 page dummy and have sent if off for review.
This is another image for the new book I’m working on.
This is obviously autobiographical.
Clean Freak!
Is the story of an unlikely friendship
between and ocd cleaner shrimp and a
hording hermit crab.
Manny, an OCD cleaner shrimp never
stops cleaning and organizing his small
nook on the reef, a regular Felix Unger.
Manny’s world is turned upside down
when a new neighbor moves in. He’s not
just a hermit crab, he’s a hermit hoarding
crab named Louie. Manny tries to be a
good neighbor, but it’s hard, Louie is so
messy and his junk constantly spills over
on to Manny’s home. Louie’s sloppy habits
and obnoxious behavior drive Manny up
the wall he can’t take it anymore and
becomes a Clean Freak. He cleans
everything in Louie’s house while Louie
is sleeping. When Louis wakes up he’s
astonished and touched at the act of service.
Louie tries to reciprocate the act of service
by giving Manny a gift ( to Manny it’s
disgusting junk, but he accepts the gesture).
With a few acts of kindness an uncommon
friendship is born between a cleaner shrimp
and a Hoarding Hermit Crab. In the end
Manny even clean’s Louie’s gunk and barnacle
ridden shell. In the end this “odd
couple” make great neighbors, one is always
messy and the other always cleans and in
their own way balances out the eccentricities
of the other.
I was inspired by the story marathon Jed Henry did several months ago, and after getting approval from my overworked literary agent I set out on a 25 five story marathon myself. It was a great experience forcing myself to come up with a new story and art every day. A lot of bad ideas came out of it and some good. I will not share all of my stories here. The marathon helped weed out some new concepts and stories I want to develop further into actual picture books. This was my second submission entitled Pidge and Pudge. The first page has a synopsis of the characters & story. Enjoy!
Scribble, Scrabble, Babble 