Camping!

As I've mentioned before, in addition to illustrating for kids, I also license out my art to manufacturers of many kinds of products, and today I thought I'd show you my most recent collection. Its called Camping, and this one was a struggle to put together - sometimes collections are easy and my fingers can't move fast enough to get everything down on paper that I want to, and other times they just don't want to appear and are really difficult and I second and third and fourth guess myself before things click. I started out with this one knowing I wanted to do a camping collection, and drew lots of tents and hiking boots and backpacks and forest creatures...but things just weren't coming together. I was having a hard time picturing what the final art would look like, when normally I have a pretty clear vision in my head. I figured I'd start coloring everything and chose my colors and just hoped for the best.

But it was boring. The animals didn't make sense with all the camping gear, they felt like a different collection, and the camping outdoor stuff didn't have any life to it....I banged my head against the wall, swore a bit, and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work. The forest animals needed to be their own group. So I took them, added a moose, a skunk, and other friends, changed the colors and made them into a baby/toddler group that you can see here. Good, I thought. Then I turned to the camping theme, and said, ok now its your turn. I added some forest scenes, and some word paper, made the layouts more dynamic and voila! It looks not too bad. Now I think I've got something, and I feel a lot better about both new collections.