Baby on Board

I'm working on a new book scheduled for Spring 2017. It's by Marianne Berkes and published by Dawn Publications. I'll post more as I go along. If you haven't guessed by the illustrations it's about how animals carry their young. How did somebody carry you when you were just a tiny baby?

This baby chimp is cradled in a "sleeping" nest.

Baby clings on mama's hair. 

This mom is like a living raft as she transports her pup.

The illustrations above are known as works-in-progress or WIP. They change as we continually tweak, refine and research. What you see now may look very different by the time the book goes to press this fall. I work directly with the art director and editor then they show the art to the author. There's a lot of collaborative feedback - all this behind the scenes tweaking goes into making the book that much better. After we're all happy with it then it goes to vetters, professionals in their field, who might make more suggestions. We want the final outcome to be a fun and imaginative picture book that's based on reality in nature. Here's a great article by Tania Lombrozo, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who explains why kids love books based on nonfiction!

Check back for new babies as I continue to draw; maybe a cub, a joey, a pup, a spiderling, who knows? And there will be at least one spread showing a special father who's the caregiver for his young. Can you guess which animal that could be?

And I'm totally honored to be a part of Fulcrum Publishing's 3rd Third Series. Patty Maher is in charge of this program. She was my art director for Ignacio's Chair and we've been friends ever since. She didn't mention this in the flyer, but Patty will be doing a presentation on the Caldecott Award. Hopefully I won't be too nervous about my presentation to enjoy hers.

3rd Third Seminar

As always, thanks for taking a look! You can click on the images for an enlarged view.