A New Children's Book is on the way!


"Red the Cow" the true story of a boy and his dairy cow is a book I've been illustrating the last few months. It's a beautiful story about a young boy who was given an older dairy cow to milk. Written as a rhyming Alphabet book, "Red the Cow" is an easy read for young children, but it also contains sidebars with lots of additional information about how farming was done in the 1950's.

The illustrations were all done using models. I did the book this way because the characters ran all the way through the book and I wanted to maintain their likeness from illustration to illustration. The paintings are very realistic, but I took great license with the colors, pumping up the warms for a beautiful sunlit look. To be honest, this was done mostly to brighten my own mood during those long grey winter days in 2018.

My favorite illustration is one of the saddest ones in the book. The main character discovers that his cow is no longer producing milk, and that makes her a candidate for the family's beef supply. When my young model was posing for this illustration, I asked him to look sad. But to my surprise, he said he didn't know how to be sad. So I tried several sad scenarios on him, like "What if I had a nice chocolate ice cream cone for you and just as I was going to hand it to you...it dropped on the floor." And he responded, "I think you would probably get me another one." Finally, I said "I can't believe you don't know how to be said!" And because he realized that he didn't know how to be sad, he suddenly became sad about it. So I got my photo.

It's really a charming book. And I can't wait to get it published and out in the public. I am hoping to have it up for sale by the end of May 2019. Look for it on my website, and I'll post it here.

Now...it's back to painting a lush garden scene in which Ricky, the main character, discovers that he prefers vegetables and fruits to eating beef.

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