Here's the Cherios box with "Great Dog Wash" inside...

I've been working away on Wow! Ocean! these last few weeks. The family and I are going to Costa Rica for a much needed vacation/surf trip/jungle adventure in June, so I'll get a little research in. I'm getting lots of great feedback from "The Great Dog Wash" Cheerios project- seems like with a million and a half out there everyone who eats breakfast got one! Thanks. Here are some of the pencil sketches for Wow! Ocean! And, because the vertical format goes so well on the web, a drawing I did this morning for New Jersey Monthly as well... R.

The Great Dog Wash Cherios campaign!

'The Great Dog Wash: by Shelly Breaner, and me, is out in one and a half million cheerios boxes. See this link... and this one, and here's the google...

This was fun to do, but what really drew me to the project was the wonderful Cheerios reading program and the "gasp" press run. The full size version will be in bookstores this summer. Eat your Cheerios! R.

I'm posting three editorial drawings this morning! The first is about buying houses... the second is a magazine illustration (Business Week) about corporations real stand on healthcare (nationalize it, yesterday...) and the third is how ordinary people will torture if authority asks them to. Fun.





Just returned from N.Y.C. We placed "Too Many Monsters" with Little Simon, of Simon & Shuster. It's a board book, about a little kid who has too many monsters in his room. They keep popping up, and he tries to stuff them in closets, etc....
In the meantime, my author on "Two Dogs," John Lithgow, has been up to nice things here.

New York was grey and a bit sad with the recession. I've seen it before. I graduated from Parsons in'75, the year Jerry Ford (bless his heart anyway) told NYC to drop dead. The food was spectacular.

Heading up to Hill

A light, wet snow fell last night. Izzy and I are doing a book signing at Hill Air Force Base's kid's book festival. They have a great child development center there and I go up and read from time to time. I can't wait for Air Show to come out next summer- Treat and I will go up and read- taking turns being the tower and the plane- Navajo nine five Charlie Lima... Air Show is full of aviation speak, and the idea is that all you need is a cardboard box and the book for many happy hours of flying. The endpapers are the instrument panel from N95CL, Treat's airplane, faithfully drawn... I'll do a comprehensive post on Air Show soon with pictures of our journey from tiny Heber, Utah airport to the great Oshkosh air show with Treat Williams, two other pilots and their three teenage boys. It was a blast. There were ten thousand airplanes there from every era and of every type imaginable. It was aviation geek heaven. So that's a tease. I'll put something together soon. Here's some pics as an appitizer; Treat and I with an enormous Canadian Air Force Lancaster bomber (1942), the last one still flying, and Carl's Chinese MIG. (Carl is our co-pilot in the book.)

Wow! Ocean!

Good morning. I'm just having coffee and waking up...I've started in on the long awaited (by me anyway) Wow! Ocean! This first involved a trip to the public library and a giant stack of reference books. That and countless hours spent on the beach and in the water surfing... The plan is to cram every possible detail into each picture and then to label the major fish- by their common name- not scientific, which would be a major incursion into Latin.
The set up is very simple and goes something like this; "Izzy was a mountain girl, she lived up on top of the world. Izzy and her sister Jo, were really hot one summer, so...
They went to the ocean! and then we proceed with the wows...I'll have the girls in every spread doing a different aquatic activity. I wasn't sure how that would work, but, as often happens, once it's out of one's head and drawn on paper, it takes shape and makes sense...
A note on format; these drawings are simple thumbnail sketches to establish the general composition of each spread and to set the pacing of the book. These are then blown up and used as a general guideline for the pencil roughs, much more detail is added, and then the pencils are traced onto watercolor paper and the final ink drawings are done. Color is done on the Mac.



That's it for today...there's a lot of Wow drawing to do...and some magazine work too... and the kids come home early! (Friday).

This was done today for Slate.com about a young lady who has had Earth Day up to her ears!