Thank you everyone for entering the contest on my website, for a school visit. I will never forget the wonderful people in Windsor, Newfoundland where I visited last spring. Next time I go, I would like to drive and go on the ferry, so I can stop and see things, and go out whale and bird watching. There is one Moose for every 4 people in Newfoundland, so I would hope to see a Moose as well. Windsor is not a large town, so don’t get discouraged about the contest if your community is not large. The website tabulates how many “likes” they have put on the Facebook page.

Now that I’m back in my art studio, I am hard at work on CINDERS which I need to complete by just after Christmas. I took special time with the jacket, a very important element in the book, because it asks the viewer to open the book and read it.

Thank you to everyone who attended my booksignings. I hope many of you had fun drawing Mossy along with me. If you weren’t able to go to a booksigning, you can see the How To Draw demonstration on a video on my website.

Truthfully, a chicken is hard to paint and to capture its beauty.

Since I begin work on the story in January, December is the time I’m tying things together – in this case my “chicken” Cinderella story.

Normally, a children’s picture book has 32 pages, but in this one instance the printer will configure the dimension of the pages so they will open up from a folded position so I will have twice as much space to draw the dancing chickens.

Next time you are in a bookstore you can see the work of some of the world’s most talented book designers on the jackets of the books. The size and shape of the letters are important, as well as where they are placed on the jacket, and the color too