Here’s a page for a coloring book about recycling commissioned by Positive Promotions for Earth Day. Text explaining the illustration is to be added in production. This one is a simplified version of the steps to recycle glass. Crushing, Melting, and Forming New Bottles.
Here’s a page for a coloring book about recycling commissioned by Positive Promotions for Earth Day. Text explaining the illustration is to be added in production.
There were four pages in this project meant to explain the recycling processes for different materials to young children. Initially I was to copy the original illustration, but in my style. Unfortunately, the original illustrations were quite fanciful. For example, the image below is about how plastics are recycled. The second step in the original had a worker chopping the plastic up with an ax, like a lumberjack. Very easy to understand, but not at all how it works. That fit well with the silly cartoon characters from the original design, but not with my more realistic cartoon characters.
So, for my versions of the recycling process illustrations, I had to find a balance between the silly original concepts and what actually happens in a recycling plant. I couldn’t make it completely realistic because the function of much of the equipment actually used is not obvious to an outside observer, and particularly not to young kids. But I couldn’t make it too silly or it wouldn’t fit the style.
So, for this image, my version of step two has whole plastic items coming down a conveyor belt into a machine and shredded plastic coming out the other end. Still not exactly how it looks in a recycling center, but close enough to be clearly understood without being too silly.
So, the simplified steps for plastic recycling for this page are: Sorting, Chopping, Melting, Forming into Pellets, and Making New Products.
Here’s an image that appears on page 15 of a coloring book about recycling commissioned by Positive Promotions for Earth Day. Text to be added to the speech bubbles in production.
Here’s an image that appears on page 7 of a coloring book about recycling commissioned by Positive Promotions for Earth Day. I don’t think I quite hit the character consistency as well as I could have on the girl on the left. Her cheeks really should have been a little rounder. Casualty of this being a rush job. But I really like how the overall scene with the tree and the swing and such turned out.
Here’s the first of two illustrations for the first page of a coloring book about recycling commissioned by Positive Promotions for Earth Day. Words will be added to the speech bubbles in production.
Here’s page 10 from My Treehouse, a short graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. This is the last page for this book. 
Here’s page 9 from My Treehouse, a short graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. The girl really has a remarkable view from the deck of her treehouse. If you look close, you’ll see a road with two bridges. One over a river and another over railway tracks. There’s traffic on the road. The distant fields have trees along the fencelines and there are cows in a field closer in.
Here’s page 8 from My Treehouse, a short graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. As you can see, it’s really not so much a treehouse as an elevated playhouse build around some trees. But the girl seems to like it.
Here’s page 7 from My Treehouse, a short graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z. A cropped version of this image is also used on the title page.
Here’s page 6 from My Treehouse, a short graded reader I recently illustrated for Learning A-Z.
Karen B. Jones - Illustrator 