It's Bath Time- Highlights Hello

I received these tiny books! They are the smallest format I have ever illustrated and so darn cute! Pages are really sturdy and since they are so small these books will fit wonderfully in toddlers' hands.

This is my favorite spread. I thought at brushing time, bunny should be brushing ducky too. :o)

Sometimes with board books there is not so much room to tell a parallel story with the illustrations as there is with Picture Books for example. Board books are very straight forward, usually with a few simple and easy to read images that little ones can really recognize. But I find there is always a way to make things interesting for little ones reading the book. I decided to give baby bunny a favorite toy, rubber ducky. So kids can look for ducky on every page, find him and look forward to the next page where they will look for him again.

Another great thing about illustrating books is that sometimes the power of an image can make the text change. For example, on this page, the text initially was "dry everywhere".

I decided instead of have dad dry bunny with a towel like on the left, it would be fun to have bunny shaking his little tail. I mean, what a better way to dry all over and fast right? Hehe.. Plus I just knew kids would really like that page. Luckily Highlights agreed with me, they really loved that illustration and decided to work the text around it.

So, never doubt sending your initial ideas of how you think a book should go. Send them your best possible interpretation of the book. These are sketches and they will go through a lot of eyes in the publishing house and a lot of revisions. People can't really guess what you have in mind. The best way to tell them is to show them your vision.

There is something so especial about creating books for babies. It's a book in it's simplest form. The thought of catching babies' attention and just thinking of baby snuggling with mom/dad looking with wonder at the book... It's a privilege to do this.

It's Bath Time is a delightful little book part of a set of books published by Highlights and goes along beautifully with their new magazine Highlights Hello. :o)

Two new titles just released

Two new titles from the Ladybird Happy Babies Series are out today! Bathtime and Teatime. :o)

While I was working on them I learned "teatime" in the UK also refers to mealtime. I always thought it was the actual teatime at 5pm, you know, the one with delicious cookies and biscuits, hee! Anyway, this goes to show you that we learn something new everyday.

Teatime Baby and Bathtime Baby are cute little peep-through board books that show babies in their daily routines, bedtime, playtime, teatime and bathtime. The rhyming text describes what is happening in each picture, and baby looks through the hole in the page to find out what the baby in the book is doing next.

All the books in the series feature a cute teddy that gives clues to the baby reading the book. They also have a ladybird hidden somewhere on each page so baby has to play and find it.

The books are available in the UK but I recently found this site that ships around the world and the shipping is free. How great is that?

I love working on these little books. Pure joy! :o)

What I'm working on

Hi there!

To share a bit of what I'm doing at the moment, I finished working on the animal book I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is a lovely book filled with all kinds of animals. It was a time consuming project in the sense that I had to do quite a lot of illustrations.

I also recently finished working on the two baby books from the series I'm illustrating and have just started to work on the following two. I love working on these! Really, they are so much fun. There is something about drawing babies, you can't sketch them without smiling. :o)

Another thing I did recently was work on my website, it went through a little make-over so to speak. I tried to still keep it very simple and clean. I used iWeb. It's so incredibly easy to use it's ridiculous!

And one last thing I wanted to mention. We all know how devastating Japan's earthquake and Tsunami has been. I can't get my mind off these poor people and country. They really need all our help. Even if you think you are just one person in a sea of millions and you wont really make a difference, you can. If we all help it will count. Your help alone might not be able to clear an area from destruction but it can give a grandmother a meal for a day. Or help get a blanket to keep a child warm. It doesn't matter how much you can give, just help in any way you can. It does count.

I decided to help too. You can read more about it here.