Here are a few of the early sketches in the process of creating Snowmastodon! Snow Day Adventure. We had a very short window of 3 months to come up with the story and create all the illustrations so there wasn’t too much time for sketching.
I think ‘Always Cute’ was a good motto to keep in mind as I worked through the illustrations.
Well… Invisibleman certainly has been quiet for a while. Dusty even! I’ll briefly speak to my own absence: Around November of last year I set about writing and putting together a dummy for my Three Friends story. Just as I’d wrapped that up and was plotting getting that out into the world I received an email from a old Syracuse classmate Amiee White Beazley. Amiee was looking for an illustrator for a children’s book she was writing based on the recent amazing paleontological find in Snowmass Colorado. The story was to be about a young mastodon and her friend the giant sloth and titled “Snowmastodon! Snow Day Adventure”. The only trick was we had a very short turnaround time of three months and the story was in rough draft form. So the last 3 months have been a blur with a lot of early mornings and late nights in the studio (aka The Garoffice) but I’m incredibly stoked to have the opportunity to work on this project. People’s Press out of Woody Creek Colorado is the publisher and they were really great to work with. And a huge thanks to fellow invisibleman Jon Keegan who passed my info along to Amiee. Jon has connected me to a lot of incredible opportunities over the years. I’ll have a lot more to blab about and show over the coming weeks but here are some of the final illustrations sans text. Should be published about two weeks from now and copies can be purchased here.
The above image is from the title page. I ended up illustrating the cover text and dropcaps as well.
Snowmastodon and sloth make snow angels while deciding to climb the big mountain.
Snowmastodon!
It seems these two were early proponents of winter board sports.
The publisher allowed me to create endpapers which I was greatly excited about.
More images, sketches and photos to come relating to Snowmastodon – even a couple incredibly cool songs my brother and fellow invisibleman James is creating for the project.
