It’s a really interesting read especially if making comics is something you’re doing or thinking about doing.

Read it here: http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/31/thinking-of-making-your-own-comic-book-read-this-first

This week’s Animal Alphabet contribution was inspired by that old Saturday Night Live skit with Harry Shearer about the synchronized swimmers who didn’t know how to swim. Someone needs to make a children’s book about a dolphin who’s afraid to swim. Also I just got back from Folly Beach where the dolphins were leaping out of the ocean every five minutes.

Recently my daughter learned in preschool that caterpillars build cocoons and then turn into butterflies. This blew her little mind and she wouldn’t stop talking about it for three days. It is a pretty amazing accomplishment when you think about it.

More Animal Alphabet entries can be found here: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com/

Cartoonists Ben Towle and Rob Ullman have started a new weekly drawing exercise called The Animal Alphabet Project. They are posting them to Twitter and here on this new Tumblr: http://animalalphabet.tumblr.com/. Each monday is a new letter and artists are welcome to pop in and contribute each week. I got a late start on mine last night so my first entry is a day late but I’m looking forward to trying to keep up with this as a nice way to draw things that have nothing to do with 9/11 or guys getting stoned in their rental house.

I was frankly a little unsure at first why I had been invited to attend. My creepy, 9/11 comic was not something that I could show to kids so I expected to be sitting there doing nothing for 6 hours. I couldn’t have been more wrong. From the moment the convention started I had a line of kids at my table waiting for me to draw them sketches of whatever they wanted. At one point I had to tell them to wait for me while I went into the back room and ate lunch. There was literally no break until I left at 5:30. I was probably busier that afternoon than I was the whole 3 days at HeroesCon.

The kids were all great and really receptive and interested in seeing me draw. I asked just about each one if they read comic books and of course the answer was almost always no. But they knew characters like Iron Man and Spider-man from the movies and cartoons so that’s what they wanted drawings of. The cool thing was that there were a couple of kids that were interested in the aspect of drawing themselves and said they liked to draw at home. So hopefully it was encouraging and inspiring to them to see a roomful of artists doing this.

I took photos of most but not all of my sketches with my iPhone and already posted a number of them as I was doing them but here’s the rest, a little cleaned up.

This is the illustration I did for the invite for my daughter’s upcoming 2nd birthday party. Someone is a little Elmo-obsessed. The blank area at the bottom is where the event information would go – didn’t seem right to post here. I’m actually not all that happy with the caricature of my daughter though. I did a much better job on last year’s invite which you can see here.

Rummaging through my archives I thought I’d pull out these illustrations I once did for a children’s book that never quite got off the ground. Fittingly, it was about a sloth. Click below to see some more.

This is a painting I just finished as a gift for a friend to put up in his 3 year old son’s room. I have other kid’s room paintings that I’ve done and will be adding them to this section soon. In the meantime, enjoy some Robots on the moon!

This is my first ever drawing of my daughter, Evan Samantha. I did this little illustration for the invite for her first birthday party.