I know, I’m baaaad to the bone. I haven’t been blogging on any kind of regular basis, but I am back. Thanks to the energy infusion of my writer friends who all insist that someone out there will read me if I keep at it. So I’ll post at least once a week. At least!

Today I got great news. If I were really corny, I’d say it was eggciting news, but I’m not so I won’t.

My husband Jerry wrote a manuscript for a picture book, which I’m illustrating. It’s being pubbed by S&S (McElderry!!) and our editor is the fab-u Gretchen Hirsch, who actually came up with the title, Little Chicken’s Big Day. We’re very lucky bc we are working with a talented designer, Deb Sfetfios. Little Chicken (LC) needs to be in a car seat on one page, and Deb suggested it be an egg. But I thought it still needed to read “car seat”! We ended up going back and forth for what felt like forEVER and I did well over 30 iterations. Amazing how one simple object could be so hard!

Do you know why it was so hard? I’d love to know if your theory is the same as mine! Here are some of the designs, in chronological order. The second bw image is the one from the submitted dummy. The last one is the final illo.