I recently completed an educational coloring book project for Positive Promotions to be printed in time for Earth Day 2020.  This was an unusual project in two ways.

First, it was not a new work, but a reillustration of an existing book originally illustrated 25 years ago.  The previous illustrations were perfectly nice, but in a somewhat dated style.  They wanted to update it.  So, in many scenes, I was more-or-less copying a previous illustrator’s work, but in a modern style.  A few elements were even just tracework, merely updating the line style to match my illustrations.  There are no copyright or plagiarism issues because the publisher owned full rights to the previous work and instructed me to copy it.  However, I have excluded the most direct copies from what I’m sharing here because I feel weird claiming that as my work.  The samples I’ll share here for this project will only be the work that’s completely original or significantly different from the source material.

The second unusual part of this project was that it was a rush job.  The project was one color cover image and 15 pages of black and white illustrations, usually several illustrations per page, all work to be done in two weeks, start to finish.  So, this job was completed at top speed, working weekends and way more hours per day than I want to admit.  Then, on top of that, there was a miscommunication on the ages of the characters that caused me to have to go back and redraw parts of most of the sketches before I could move on to the finals.  Whew!  This was a stressful project.  But I got it done!

Anyhow, here’s the first image.  This was for the cover and is the only color illustration in the project.