I recently traveled to Key West, Florida and on the journey I wrote a poem that I decided might make a nice illustrated children’s book. It started out as a silly little poem about how one of my three cats showed up one day and decided to move in. The two resident cats didn’t take to kindly to him at first and let him know about it.  It suddenly dawned on me  that there was a bit more to it after all. I think it is a good message for children (and for adults too) about judging someone you don’t know too harshly and/or too quickly. It also tells that you get a lot more from sharing than you do by being territorial. I will save the rest of the story for when I finish the book and the illustrations. I have been working on other projects lately and therefore feel a bit rusty in my illustration skills. Luckily, I randomly came across this work by Stefan Butcher on lynda.com:

His website is: http://www.dailymonster.com/. I like the idea and the discipline of doing something everyday. He creates a new monster drawing every day and I am hoping that if I start to fill my sketchpad with illustrations every day, some wonderful ideas will emerge that I can use in the book.

I also admire his clean yet strong minimalist approach to illustration, in a world where so many are shooting for hyper-realistic computer driven styles.  I’ll let you know what happens…and post some of the work to get some feedback.