Thrilling Thursday: Big Fibs, Sharp Knives

I received my advance copy!
Me with book
My first Children’s book, which I wrote and illustrated, is part of a series for Holiday House called I Like to Read for VERY young readers. It’s called “The Big Fib” and even though it’s on Amazon already: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Fib-Like-Read/dp/0823429393 It doesn’t go on sale until January.

I can’t go into the complex plot, but it involves stealing boxes and making a mess. This idea is ripped from the gritty details of my own childhood. I grew up in a small town where nothing much ever happened so we had to make our own trouble. Near my house was something called an Office Supply Store. One of the favorite things for my friends and I to do? Root though the garbage of said Office Supply Store! There were old typewriters, reams of paper and cardboard boxes that were six feet tall! We would pull the giant boxes from the trash, I would sneak the nice steak knifes out of my kitchen and we would start cutting. Cutting windows or doors to create whatever we were making out of our cardboard building material. We sometimes cut each other, or ourselves, with the knives but we had a sacred oath never to seek out medical attention. If my parents found out we were using the nice steak knives to saw cardboard, and the random stick or Mego action figure, it would be game over for building forts (or wings for my one man flying device that I never did get to test properly by jumping off the porch roof). To this day, when I take my shirt of, my wife gasps when she sees the scars I acquired during this happy phase of my life. Eventually the owner of the office supply store talked with my dad and explained that he didn’t care if we took the boxes, he just asked we clean up the mess we left behind. We agreed that this was a good idea, which we promptly never followed through on. We were six-seven years old, what did they expect? We continued to steal boxes until one day we found something horrendous in a particularly large and treasured box. A dirty diaper. We all ran screaming. We huddled on my back porch holding each other. Never had we encountered such evil. We were never sure if some passerby had dumped a diaper in there, or if the owner of the store had put it in there to teach us a lesson. As an adult, I lean towards the latter. As his children were grown, I’m not sure where he would have gotten a dirty diaper, and I’m not taking this story down that particular dark path of speculation. We didn’t take boxes from the office store very much after that. At the dinner table my father thanked me for being more of a grown up and not making a mess with the neighbors garbage anymore as we all tried to cut our meat with steak knives as dull as sh*t.

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Cintiq Monday

So I bought a used Cintiq from a fellow artist over the holiday. Here is my first warm up sketch done entirely in the computer. Nothing to write home about. I’ll be forgoing bathes and food this week while I watch tons of “how to” videos on you tube….Girl test

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